
Another conference call, another app, another PIN, another log-in. Joining conference calls should be as simple as dialing a phone number, without needing to enter random conference IDs. In this post, we will walk through how you can build a conference line that anyone can join, using Twilio with C# and ASP.NET Core.
Developer Environment Setup
Let's make sure you have the software you need to build this conference line. For this, you will need:
Create the ASP.NET Core Project
Get started by creating a folder for your project. I'll be using C:\Code\Conference
in this post but you can use your preferred project path. Open a command prompt and enter the following commands.
mkdir C:\Code\Conference & cd C:\Code\Conference
dotnet new webapi
dotnet add package Twilio
code .
exit
It will create …

Twilio TV aims to entertain and inform a global network of millions of developers as they connect with the Twilio community and learn how to build the future of communications together. We deliver video content that developers can engage with both live and on demand with their peers. Take a look below for this month's lineup.
Live! on Twilio TV Lineup
Day | Shows | Start Time (Local to Streamer) | Start Time (UTC) |
---|---|---|---|
Monday | Phil Codes | 10:00am AEDT | 11:00pm UTC |
Casual Coding | 2:00pm GMT | 1:00pm UTC | |
Fun with Functions | 3:30pm GMT | 2:30pm UTC | |
Tuesday | Phil Codes | 10:00am AEDT | 11:00pm UTC |
The Baby Developer Show | 3:30pm GMT | 2:30pm UTC | |
TQ Tuesdays | 9:00am PDT | 4:00pm UTC | |
Str … |

As a .NET developer, I've been excited to explore all of the great things that came with the release of .NET Core 3.0. I have spent time playing with one of the newly launched technologies, Blazor, which allows me to build web applications targeting web assembly using HTML, CSS and C#.
In my excitement, I went to see what the fuss was about. Following the instructions on Blazor.net, I updated Visual Studio 2019, installed the Blazor project templates, created a new Blazor app project, and then realized there were some choices I needed to make in order to build my shiny Blazor web application. As I made some choices and got going with my project I continued to see more and more places where I wished some things had already existed to help make development easier.
As a result, I've put together this list of tips to help sort …

It's an exciting time to be a .NET developer as .NET Core 3.0 has reached general availability. With this release comes Blazor, Microsoft's take on building web applications using WebAssembly and the technologies you already know and love such as HTML, CSS, and C#. I published a prior blog post when Blazor was still in active development. It's time to join the release party and share our excitement about Blazor with Twilio and C#.
The first thing you should do when a new product gets announced is tell your friends, right - but what if we phoned them with a special note sharing our excitement? Let's build a web application that does exactly that - it uses Twilio to phone a friend, and is powered by Blazor.
Installing Our Developer Tools
Now in order to follow along - you'll need a few things first. You'll want to grab …

In this blog post, we are going to use Blazor to build a simple web page that makes telephone calls straight from your browser with C# and Twilio. What is Blazor you ask? It is a new experimental framework that allows developers to build web applications using HTML, C#, and WebAssembly. With WebAssembly, your browser downloads the web application’s binaries from the server and runs the code locally in a sandboxed environment from your browser. This means you’ll write your client side code with a compiled language like C# and have it run faster and more safely from your browser. You can check out the code on Github. If anything else sounds foreign to you, keep calm and carry on! We’ll tak …

As developers, we’ve all done this at least once. We’ve spent time building a cool project that uses a third party API, and then checked it into Github only to realize our API password is there in plain text for all to see. Do a search in Github to see how frequently this still happens.
When I’m writing code for the first time I hard code those values in my code to get things working and then go to commit it to source control. That’s about the time I remember saving passwords into source control is one of the seven Deadly Sins of Security.
If you’re coding in .NET, the Secret Manager makes it easy to remove these sensitive details before checking your code in. It saves those passwords in your environment variables on your machine.
Let’s say you find yourself building an app that searches for music on …

We share a lot in common with Bruce Wayne. By day, Bruce Wayne is a dashing billionaire running his family’s company. At night, he dons the cape and cowl to become Batman, fighting crime and driving fear into the hearts of his enemies. Think about it... Wearing the cape and cowl protects Bruce Wayne’s identity. You are probably thinking – how does this relate to me?
When you connect a device to the internet, it shares identifiable information with each of sites or services it connects to. However, when your device connects to a proxy server before reaching the internet, the proxy server protects your identity and exchanges completely different information about your connection, making you untraceable. It protects your identity just as Batman’s cape and cowl does for Bruce Wayne.
As a developer, I wonder – what happens when my code needs to run through a proxy server first …

Ahh the holidays are here. Christmas time makes me think of classic songs like Happy Holidays, Silver Bells, or It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could crowdsource the music selection at holiday gatherings? This sounds like the perfect candidate for a serverless application powered by Twilio & Spotify. In this post, we will walk through creating an Azure Function to respond to text message requests.
Creating our Azure Functions project in Visual Studio
This project’s ingredients include:
- Visual Studio 2017 Community (at least version 15.5)
- During setup, install the “Azure development” workload
- If you’re using Windows, grab Azure Functions and Web …

What are We Doing
I’ve been a huge .NET fan since the days of .NET Framework 1.1. A number of years and upgrades later, Microsoft turned things up by introducing .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to write and run code from wherever we want without sacrificing productivity, security, or performance. If you’re asking the question, “Well, what does .NET Core do for me?”, then check this out. In a previous blog post, we built an API that shares photos via MMS backed by Dropbox cloud storage using C# and the .NET Framework 4.5. Let’s convert that API from targeting the .NET Framework to .NET Core.
How are We Doing This
To do this, we need to
- Install .NET Core (and any pr …

Births are Spectacular but Sharing births is difficult
On Jan 24th, 2017 my wife and I added a baby boy to our family. When he arrived, we felt overwhelming joy from bringing a new baby into the world, and were anxious to share this with our friends and family who were about three thousand miles away. Then came the challenge – how should we share this new experience with them?
This is the part where the question “ever heard of Facebook or Instagram?” comes up but that didn’t quite fit my need. See we already have a two year old daughter who didn’t stop needing us when her brother was born. Combining that with the significant drop in sleep meant less energy and desire to do much else. I wanted a solution that could automate this for me with as little intervention as possible. With this in mind, …