It is easier to explain with some code. First, let’s create a list of numbers.

List<int> numbers = new List<int>{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10};

Let’s say that you want to get all of the numbers that are greater than 5. Previously, you would probably have done this with a foreach loop:

List<int> result = new List<int>();
foreach( int curNumber in numbers )
{
      if( curNumber > 5 ){ result.Add( curNumber ); }
 }

This is simple, but let’s see how to do it in LINQ.

var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
                where curNumber > 5
                select curNumber;

You get the same result, but with a much simpler syntax.

Here’s where it starts to get more interesting. You can also use linq to manipulate your data. Let’s get a list of all the numbers greater than five, but multiplied by two.

var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
                where curNumber > 5
                select curNumber * 2;

Now, what if you wanted to store both the original number and the multiplied number?

var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
                where curNumber > 5
                select new { Original = curNumber,
                                  Multiplied = curNumber * 2 };

You will get back an IEnumberable back of what is called an anonymous type. Think of the select as the same as selects in SQL. LINQ allows you do decide what to return and how to format it.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to connect LINQ to your SQL database to start working with some really powerful features.

Getting Started

First, you can create your account at https://twitter.com/signup. Enter your full name and your desired username. I recommend that if you are creating a personal account that you set your username to be your real name, this makes it easier for your friends to find you later. For example, my name is “Will Spaetzel”, so I chose the username, “spaetzel“.

Find Your Friends

Once you have signed up, you’ll be logged in automatically and taken to a page that lets you see if people you have in your address book are already on Twitter. You can import your address book from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail or MSN. Just click on the appropriate logo and enter your login information and click continue.

Twitter will then go through all of your e-mail contacts and find people who already are on Twitter that you have in your address book. You can select or unselect as many of the matches as you would like and click “Continue” the matching people will then be added to your Twitter followers.

Next, Twitter will ask if you want to invite the rest of your address book, I recommend that you just skip this step as inviting them all is likely to be annoying to your contacts. I’d also skip the step after this where Twitter recommends a number of famous users. Twitter is for conversations, and these famous people likely won’t read what you write or bother to write back to you.

Upload a Picture

Twitter gives everyone the same default profile picture. Obviously, if everyone is the same, why would people be interested in you? So upload a profile picture and stand out. To do this, click “Settings” in the top right and then click “Picture“. Click “Browse…” and find and double click picture of yourself on your hard drive. Then click “Save”. Twitter will upload the picture and set it as your default.

Send your First Tweet

Click the Twitter logo on the top-left to go back to the Twitter home page. Under “What are you doing?” type in anything that you want to share with the world. It can be a cool link that you’ve found, your thoughts on the current news or how much you are enjoying reading this article. It doesn’t matter. Just type and click “Update”. Your friends will all see your Tweet (Twitter message) on their Twitter home pages.

Replies

If you find a tweet that you have something to say back to, hover over the tweet and click the curved arrow that appears on the right of the Tweet. This will take you back to the input box with @username filled in. This is how you reply to someone publicly, just type @ followed by their username. After the username include a space and then what you want to say back to the twitter user. They will see your reply on their Twitter replies page.

Direct Messaging

If you want to send soneone a private message that the rest of Twitter to see, you can type “d username” where username is the Twitter name of the person you wish to message. Make sure that you include a space between the “d” and the username. Just as with replies, include a space after the username and then type your message. Once you click “send” the user will get an e-mail containing your private message.

Privacy

You can set up your account to hide your messages from anyone whom you haven’t granted permission to see. Just click “Settings” in the top right, scroll down and check th e”Protect my updates” box and click “Save”. When you set your profile as private you will be e-mailed whenever someone requests to see your profile and only once you grant them permission will they be able to read your Tweets.

I recommend that you keep your Twitter profile public. This allows people to find your profile though Google and other means. With a private profile, far fewer people will find you on Twitter, reducing the number of great conversations that you can have there.

Twitter Applications

It is even easier to keep up with Twitter if you use a Twitter desktop application. For new users I recommend Twhirl, It is easy to use, just enter your Twitter username and Password. The app will then show all of the Tweets from the people you follow and notify you of replies or direct messages sent to you. The app means that you’ll be able to see updates from your friends right away rather than manually checking Twitter.com.

Closing Comments

Remember, that Twitter is a place for conversation. Post Tweets that other people will be interested in. Don’t just use Twitter to broadcast news, engage your followers. And reply to the Tweets from the people you follow. Twitter is most valuable when converations happen between your Twitter community.

This post is just an introduction to Twitter, I hope that this advice will help you to get up and running on Twitter quickly; and that you will be able to get a lot out the site right away. I have more ideas about best practices for Twitter and hope to post some of them in the future.

Update: My friend, Carolyn Marshall has put a great post on “Why Twitter?”.

So I have created the Kitchener-Waterloo Social Media Meetup. We will meet on the third Wednesday of every month. The first meetup is on May 20, 2009 at 7:30 PM at Symposium in downtown Waterloo.

If you are interested in social media, be it blogging, podcasting, Facebook, Twitter or anything else. I hope to see you there!

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p style=”text-align: left;”> Building the site has been a long, but enjoyable process. After lots of feedback from many different people causing me to go through three major revisions of the site, I’ve really learned a lot about what it takes to build an intutive and enjoyable website.

I hope that many of you will give the site a try and of course keep coming back to the site that I am incredibly proud of. I look forward to seeing you on the site and hearing your feedback.

I just posted on the CastRoller blog that I will be at Podcasters Across Borders this year. I wan’t able to attend last year, so I am really looking forward to the event this time around.

When I attended for the first time in 2007, I only knew one person there: Bill Deys, and it took me a while to get to know other people there. I had a great time at Podcamp Toronto last year, knowing a good number of people before hand really helped me to have a good time.  The community is very welcoming, I’m just a person that takes a while to feel comfortable with people.So now that I know a bunch of people there, I know that I’ll have a great time.

Today and tomorrow are the last days you can get the early registration price for PAB, so if you aren’t signed up yet, you should go and register. And while you are at it register for Podcamp London as well!

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So I came up with the idea to write a tool that generates an OPML file for each of my contacts. That would certainly be better, that way I can choose to see all the photos from all my contacts, or browse each contact individually in Google Reader. And I could use this Yahoo Pipe that also manipulates the feed to give you larger photos instead of the thumbnail, and filters the photos using PostRank to get just the best photos.

The tool is here: flickropml.spaetzel.com. You just have to give the tool your Flickr ID, and it will generate an OPML ready for you to import into your reader of choice.

Bounce download.posterous.com/spaetzel/qlswJR2fvGg5u35w0SWd2xQIIHCQR1tvgXF4KrUfaNu5JVhzz2uGSszmC7El/myYearbookPhoto.jpg” width=”225″ height=”320″>

Posted by email from spaetzel’s posterous

This looks like a really useful service for posting to my blog, flickr and Twitter.

If this works well, I may end up using it quite a lot.

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