Social Networking Sites and Session Objects

"I had a dream I was stuck in an elevator with Michael Bolton, Kenny G. and Yanni,
and I had a gun - with only one bullet." -- Alan Rock (Jazz DJ)

One good answer to Alan's quote above would be to get them all to line up, one right behind the other.. but, I digress!

I have had a passing interest in the social networking buzz over the last couple of years, and the ones with API's are of course most interesting to me as a developer.

Digg is useful, and it has an API, but it really has a more narrow focus based on community ranking of posted "news" (e.g., articles, blog posts and what have you), rather than more of a concept of "communities" comprised of members who share common interests / traits.

One that is really starting to stand out is FaceBook, which has a clean, uncluttered look and actually has features that could be considered useful, unlike stuff like MySpace which (to me) is just a cluttered mess of spam and "me too" ism.

Of course the question that comes into play is "How long will it last" -- it's one thing to have 30 million users sign up like rubberneckers at a car crash, but will the usage statistics persist. Probably only Steve Ballmer knows, as rumor has it he's been trying to acquire the sucker for a ridiculous sum (in the $B's).

Another reason why I'm starting to get interested in facebook is that it can import your email contacts and uses these to determine potential "friends" - so that when you join you may be pleasantly surprised that a number of your contacts from LinkedIn, hotmail, yahoo or other mail are already members.

In fact, I saw this morning that Rob Howard had just added me as a friend (that's a compliment, Rob!). But the real interest, I think, is the FaceBook API. You can go to codeplex.com and search on "Facebook" and you'll see that there are no less than four projects that deal with .NET-ized versions of the API.

Nikhil Kothari has some work that he's done on this and also has a lot of good pointers to resources that you can find here. Time permitting, I'll be doing some work on this to figure out sensible ways that I can integrate the Facebook API into one or more of my current "playground" sites. See you on facebook!

Session Object Fun

I keep seeing various posts regarding misunderstandings of how Session works in ASP.NET. It's reference - if you modify an object that's in Session, the SESSION OBJECT is modifed. Here's some reallyreallydumb code that brings it home quickly:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Let's Drop a Gridview on the page, and create a data source...
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("Test");
// let's add a row
DataRow row = dt.NewRow();
// give the column a value
row["Test"] = "First";
dt.Rows.Add(row);
// store it in Session
Session["dt"]=dt;
// now let's modify the ORIGINAL OBJECT
dt.Rows[0]["Test"] = "Second";
// now let's bind our grid from the SESSION object
GridView1.DataSource = (DataTable) Session["dt"];
GridView1.DataBind();
// it says "Second" -- in other words, our SESSION OBJECT is MODIFIED,even though we never worked on it directly. This behavior can cause a lot of slip-ups for developers who are not familiar with it.
}