ASP.NET Core is built with first-class support for dependency injection (DI). It's used heavily by the framework, but you can also use it with your own classes. The Twilio C# helper libraries are largely static, so you don't have to use DI, but sometimes you might want to. For example, you might want to create a custom TwilioRestClient that uses the HttpClientFactory features of .NET Core 2.1. In this post, I describe how to create a custom ITwilioRestClient, register it with the ASP.NET Core DI container, and inject it into a web API controller, so you can use it to send an SMS.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this post you'll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• .NET Core 2.1 SDK (version 2.1.300 or greater)
• VS Code, Visual Studio, or other editor
• Postman for testing your API

You ...

As technology expands the reach of our products and services it’s important for us to create content to suit users from all over the world. As we primarily use Latin characters for programming, creating content for languages like Japanese or Arabic that have a different alphabet is not as easy as typing them on a standard keyboard. This post will show you how to send non-Latin characters, including emoji, in text messages with C# and Twilio Programmable SMS.

Prerequisites

You should have the following tools installed to complete the program described in this post:

• Windows 7 or Windows 10
• Basic knowledge of C# and .NET
• Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Code
• Microsoft .NET Core SDK, which includes the .NET Runtime

Why UTF-8?

The problem started when people realized that the character encoding standard of the time, ASCII, needed to be extended to accommodate the alphabets of other languages ...

Will you need an umbrella today? Don't know? That's easy to fix by looking out the window or by using Azure Functions and its Twilio SMS output binding. In this post, I'll show you how with just a few lines of code you can have a text message arrive each morning which lets you know if it might rain that day.

You can build along with me by signing up for free Azure and free Twilio accounts.

Create an Azure Function

We'll start by creating a new Azure Function App in the Azure Portal.

Once created continue configuring the Function App by adding environment variables to hold our Twilio credentials.  Open the Applications Settings for the Function App.

Add two new keys named TwilioAccountSid and TwilioAuthToken, setting their values to your Twilio AccountSid and AuthToken respectively. You can find your Twilio credentials in the Twilio Console.

Save the Application Settings ...

Ahoy and yo-ho-ho! In celebration o' International Talk Like A Pirate Day, let's build a SMS Pirate Speak translator with Azure Functions, the Fun Translations API and, of course, Twilio.

What you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• An SMS enabled Twilio number (find one here)
• An Azure account (sign up for a free Azure account here)
• Optional: pieces o' eight!

Azure Functions allow you to write code without having to worry about infrastructure or servers, so they are perfect for setting up a simple webhook for an incoming SMS or call from Twilio.

Create an Azure Function

From the Azure portal, click the Create a resource button, found at the top of the menu on the left.  Search for a Serverless Function App and then click on the matching result.

Give your app a name, I called mine twilio-sms-translator, create or reuse ...

Validating user input is important to the security and proper operation of any software application. This is particularly true of data like phone numbers, which are typically private data used to deliver both application functionality, such as messaging, and security features like 2-factor authentication.

Application development frameworks, including the .NET Framework and .NET Core provide data validation capabilities to make it easier to handle standard data types more robustly. While the .NET frameworks provide for validating phone numbers, the capabilities are limited, particularly with respect to internationalization (“i18n”).

Fortunately, there is a open source library, libphonenumber-csharp, that provides extensive resources for validating and manipulating phone numbers of all types. It’s derived from an open source library created by Google. This post shows how you can implement libphonenumber-csharp in your .NET projects and easily leverage this powerful functionality.

.NET Data Validation

A common design pattern in software built with C ...

We've already shown you how to add SMS messages to your application but now, with the new Twilio API for WhatsApp, you can send a WhatsApp message in much the same way.

And quickly.

Here's a thirty-second video showing you just how quickly.

And just to make this super easy to get started, below is all the code and a link to the completed project on GitHub.

What you'll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• The .NET Core 2.1 SDK and runtime
• The WhatsApp Sandbox Channel installed in your account (go through this process to activate the sandbox)

After you have created your new .NET Console application, add the Twilio NuGet package to the solution.  If you are unsure how to do this, check out this post.

Open the Program.cs file and add in the Twilio using statement.  Initialise the Twilio REST ...

SpaceX is on pace to launch nearly 30 rockets to space in 2018.  As a space nerd, I really love watching launches and thankfully SpaceX broadcasts launch streams online.  As frequent as launches are I forget when the next launch is so I can tune in.  Thankfully SpaceX has a great API which includes an endpoint that tells you when the next launch is.  In this post I'll show you how you can build a system using that API, Azure Logic Apps and Twilio SMS to send yourself a daily text message telling you if it's a launch day.

You can build this using a free Azure account and a trial Twilio Account.

Log into your Azure account and create a new Logic App Service.

Once you have the Logic App Service created we can begin to define the workflow we want to run.  Logic App workflows are made up ...

Setting up a .NET application takes time and sometimes you just want to write a quick bit of code that sends you a Chuck Norris joke via the Twilio API for WhatsApp! So that’s what we’re going to do with the help of Azure Functions.

What you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here)
• An Azure account (sign up for a free Azure account here)
• The WhatsApp Sandbox Channel installed in your account (go through this process to activate the sandbox)

Azure Functions allow you to write code without having to worry about infrastructure or servers, so they are perfect for setting up a simple webhook for an incoming SMS or call from Twilio.

Create an Azure Function

From the Azure portal, click the Create a resource button, found at the top of the menu on the left.  Search for a Serverless ...

Imagine you are driving along in your car and your phone beeps, letting you know that a text message has come in.  We all know it’s beyond dangerous to read a message whilst driving, it’s a pet hate of mine when I see people doing it, so why not get your text message phoned through to you? Hands-free, of course!

This post will show you how to create talking texts using Twilio, .NET Core, Cognitive Services and Azure Storage.

We will build an application that will convert incoming SMS into speech using the Speech Service, currently in preview, on Microsoft Cognitive Services.  We will then use Twilio to call your mobile and play the speech recording.

Let’s get started.

What you will need

• .NET Core 2.1 SDK (version 2.1.300 or greater)
• Azure Storage Account with a blob - set the access policy on your blob ...

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 take care of you.

LAB TOOLKIT

Now to kick off our post, we should make sure we have some tools to follow along:

• .NET Core 2 ...