Merge pull request Code52#74 from Code52/DodoRecap

To review : Dodo Recap

Author: shiftkey-tester

_posts/2012-04-16-dodo-recap.md

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+--- 
+layout: post
+permalink: /dodo-recap.html
+date: 2012-04-16 23:00
+title: "dodo recap"
+author: "@shiftkey"
+comments: true
+---
+
+The Code52 team had some big news over the weekend which I will address in a later post, but before we should get to the fun stuff about dodo.
+
+## What's been done so far 
+
+This week has been about setting up a baseline and implementing core functionality.
+
+At this point in time, the project is split into two distinct features:
+
+ - *dodo* - a Windows 8 Metro application.
+ - *boxkite* - a library for interacting with the Twitter API in .NET 4.5 Metro. 
+
+## dodo
+
+ The application currently supports:
+
+ - OAuth login
+ - Browsing the user's timeline, mentions, retweets and messages.
+ - settings storage - persisting the user's token between sessions
+ - diagnostics capture - so that we can log messages to the application's sandbox for debugging purposes.
+
+Other functionality which as been started on but not integrated into master includes
+
+ - Grouping tweets by relative time ("just now", "last hour")
+ - Semantic Zoom - collapse a group of tweets to see just the user's avatars
+ - User Streams - rather than querying for data periodically, Twitter can stream data down to an open connection inside the app.
+
+ ![](/img/dodo-example.png)
+
+## boxkite
+
+Once boxkite is feature-complete, tested and documented, it will move to a separate repository with NuGet packages available so that people can consume the API. 
+
+There are no immediate plans for boxkite to support other framework versions, as:
+
+ - it uses a number of .NET 4.5-specific features - including async/await and WebAuthenticationBroker.
+ - there are a number of [existing libraries](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-libraries#dotnet) out there for .NET apps 
+ - I would prefer to focus on the dodo application itself in the short term.
+
+ If you still have the urge to check out a shiny new Twitter library, [Matt Hamilton](http://twitter.com/mabster) spent the week building a .NET 4 client called [Budgie](http://matthamilton.net/budgie) that uses the Task Parallel Library heavily.
+
+## The future of dodo 
+
+Yes, that's a joke.
+
+I'm keen to continue building this application for several reasons:
+
+ - many developers have been interested/curious to learn about it - while the concept of a Twitter app are familiar, being able to see the internals is where the real educational value lies.
+ - I still have an urge to create a different experience for people to interact with Twitter. With the basics done, the next step is to focus on the UX.
+ - There is enough lead time to have something ready for when Windows 8 ships.
+ - There is still [a lot of work still to do](https://trello.com/board/dodo/4f82e9dfc10221fb0db2cff2).
+
+ And yes, others are more than welcome to get involved. Come [hang out](http://jabbr.net/#/rooms/code52).
+