Stickam API and ASP.NET

I’ve been spending so much time chatting with YouTube celebrities on Stickam that I’ve decided to put the time to good use and do some programming with the Stickam API. The Stickam API allows you to determine if a user is online or live, i.e. hosting a webcam chat.

The Stickam API returns XML in response to a request at a web address like http://www.stickam.com/api/user/robrobbins/profile.

I wrote an ASPX page in ASP.NET that gives me the status of four users. Unfortunately I could not extend it to handle more than four users due to the need to wait for the response. This project allowed me to learn a few new ASP.NET tricks. I learned how to use the HttpWebRequest class of the System.Net namespace to make a request to a web server and get the response. I also learned how to read through a XML document in order to get the value of a particular node. I had to play around with the syntax of a regular expression to remove some garbage at the end of the XML document. I’m not sure how the garbage wound up in the XML. The web response is being written into a buffer of 512 character bytes so the sample code I used must fail to clear the buffer properly.