The @FindMyPlane bot

A few days ago I wrote about the Genexus Challenge developer edition and my first Smart Devices app, Find my Plane. Once I get, what I think is, a good idea in my head I get around it a lot to improve it in every possible way. But this is not the case, sort of.

Right after I deployed the app to the Apple’s app store, I thought “how can I advertise it, without paying for advertising of course”, I needed people to find out about the app and download it, and a good word about it would be awesome too. So I thought about social networks… Facebook is for friends and I already told them to download it (did I mentioned it’s free?!) so twitter came to mind… but what can I do to promote my app from twitter, other than twitting about it of course.

So I thought of the @FindmyPlane bot and this post will tell you how I did it, not that it’s rocket science, but I found an interesting use of Windows Azure’s Worker Roles*. Wait, what?! you’re gonna tell people how to build a twitter spammer bot? No, let me get into that.

The @FindMyPlane twitter account works like this. You send a twit to @FindMyPlane with your flight number and find my plane will answer that tweet with useful info about it, the same kind of info you’d get in the Find My Plane app, but of course, only the info that fits in 140 characters.

So this is how it works. There’s a worker role (called Receiver) that every ten seconds access the twitter api looking for mentions for the @FindMyPlane account. Once it gets the list of tweets (if any of course) it saves them to a Table from Azure Storage and saves the latest tweet id in a Queue (also from Azure Storage) so the next time it just asks from that tweet on.

This is pretty much the code:

string lastTweet = "";
string previousMessageId = "";
foreach (CloudQueueMessage message in Queue.GetAllMessages(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_QUEUE))
{
    previousMessageId = message.Id;
    lastTweet = message.AsString;
}

bool first = true;
foreach (Status status in Mentions.GetMentions(fmp, lastTweet))
{
    try
    {
        Table.Insert(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_TABLE, TweetEntity.FromStatus(status).ToString());
    }
    catch { }

    if (first)
    {
        lastTweet = status.Id;
        first = false;
    }
}

if (!first)
{
    Queue.DeleteMessage(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_QUEUE, previousMessageId);
    Queue.CreateMessage(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_QUEUE, lastTweet);
}

And there’s a second Worker Role (called Replier) that every ten seconds queries the table where the tweets were saved for those that have not been replied yet and don’t have errors. For every tweet I try to get info of the flight number sent, if I do find info, I reply the tweet with that info and update the record on the table as replied. If I can’t find info, let’s say you tweeted “@FindMyPlane is awesome!” I update the record as ‘with errors’. This is just a way for me to know when I couldn’t reply because of an error on the system or because what I got was not a valid flight number.

Code here:

string query = "Replied eq 'False' and Error eq 'False'";
foreach (TableEntity entity in Table.Query(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_TABLE, query))
{
    string flightNumber = entity["Text"].ToUpper().Replace("@FINDMYPLANE ", "");
    try
    {
        FlightInfo info = FlightStatus.GetFlightStatus(flightNumber);
        string tweet = string.Format("@{0} {1}", entity["UserScreenname"], info);
        Update.UpdateStatus(tweet, fmp, entity["Id"]);
        entity["Replied"] = "True";

        Table.UpdateEntity(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_TABLE, entity);
    }
    catch 
    {
        try
        {
            entity["Error"] = "True";
            Table.UpdateEntity(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_TABLE, entity);
        }
        catch
        {
            Table.DeleteEntity(Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, Constants.AZURE_STORAGE_KEY, Constants.AZURE_TABLE, entity.PartitionKey, entity.RowKey);
        }
    }
}

Cool uh?!

Here’s how all this works together

(*) for a good read on the Azure platform, Worker Roles and Storage (Table, Queues & Blobs) go to: http://bit.ly/SGAzure

You can download the ‘Find my Plane’ for Android and for iPhone.

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Annoy Smarx from Windows Phone 7

Annoy Smarx is a web app that Steve Marx showed in Windows Azure Firestarter event. It is a web app that once you clicked on an image, Steve’s notebook wallpaper would change to the selected image. It was a pretty cool demo cause it showed you a good practical sample of AppFabric ServiceBus.

Last week I started playing around with the new Windows Phone 7 SDK, and I faced the problem I do when I start something new, “what should I code”? I t has to be simple cause I’m new to this stuff (I’m no too familiar with silverlight either) but not too simple… I hate the “Hello World!” sample. So I thought maybe I can create a client for the AnnoySmarx sample and so I did.

I liked it cause it a simple project, yet it has many cool features, like downloading blobs from Azure Storage, using a ListBox to show the images, handling the double tap event on Windows Phone 7 (there’s no OnDoubleTap event, so it might be a little more complicated than you think), and calling a rest service on ServiceBus which is actually running on my computer.

You’ll find all the resources you need at Steve’s post and the code for this client here.

I recorded a video of the app running on the emulator…

pretty cool uh?!

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My Run 2.0 samples

Last week Run 2.0 took place in Montevideo and I had the privilege of working with Guadalupe Casuso (from Microsoft) and Luis Pandolfi (from Infocorp) on part of the Keynote, we talked about Windows Azure and if you ask me it was too short.

After the keynote I talked to some people who told me the session was great, but most of them already knew about Azure, so I guess I never know how good/clear was for someone new to the Windows Azure Platform (if you’re in this category please send me a line). One thing Guadalupe told us, and I guess she was right, is that there’s no point of showing something you can’t use yet… it’s like showing a kid a candy. I don’t know, but one thing I do know is that we could have use the entire conference to talk about Azure :)

On my part of the session I had to show something on ServiceBus so I showed Steve Marx’s AnnoySmarx sample. I changed a few thing from the listener, one thread would never end unless you close the cmd window, and added a few messages for demoing purposes. The sample is pretty cool cause it let you change the wallpaper of my computer by clicking the images from an online web page (in this case hosted on Windows Azure). For my sample I deployed the web app at http://gomezwallpaper.cloudapp.net/ and people from the audience would get online and click on the images while on the main screen you could see the wallpaper of my notebook changing. I was pretty cool and showed how you can get servicebus up & running with a little extra work from what you do to host regular WCF services.

Another tool I used is Windows Azure Storage Explorer which I built myself to browse and manage items from a Storage Account. I recently uploaded the source code to codeplex, the project is here.

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New features to the Azure Web Storage Explorer

On the first version you could only manage blobs, upload, delete and download them. Now I added the same functionality for Queues and Tables.
I found a pretty cool way of showing unstructured data from the Azure tables from a gridview control. How? with my good old friends the DataSets :)
I also updated the source code so you can download the source files from the version that it’s right now running on the Azure platform.
Go to http://storageexplorer.cloudapp.net/ to see the application running and here to download the source code.
Feedback is always welcome!

Edit: url is now http://azurestorage.azurewebsites.net

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