Back in December 2015 Star Wars: The Force Awakens started airing on cinemas. I have been a good fan of Star Wars for years now, but do you know what else I’m good at? Not buying cinema tickets when they start selling months in advance.

My friend James had been telling me for months about how his brother, on the spur of the moment bought a dozen tickets and gave them to all of his friends. As you can probably guess, I never got to meet his brother.

December 18th, the day SW:TFA was released I got a message from James. At this point I already knew I was only going to see the film on the 21st.

James was pretty stoked about the movie and wanted to talk about it. Fast track to December 21st when I actually got to see the movie and tried to reply to his SMS message as soon as I got into the London Underground on my way back.

Let me tell you something about James. As much as he claims he likes technology, he’s not present in any form of social networking services, and most of our communication happens via phone (voice or SMS) or whenever we meet. Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp was not an option here.

That’s why today I will show you how to build an application that breaks the barriers between IP communications and PSTN – the protocol used for SMS messages – and helps us bridging Twilio Programmable Chat and SMS with ASP.NET

If you don’t feel like following through and want to skip straight to the final application, I’ve got you covered with my Github Repository.

Our weaponry

Attack of the Clones

We will clone a starter repository in just a bit, but first let’s make sure we have all the necessary credentials and a phone number so we can use it with our application.

On the Twilio dashboard get yourself a telephone number with SMS capability if you don’t already have one.

Now head to your favourite command line application and clone the C# Twilio Programmable Chat Quickstart Project for Mac. Make sure you follow the readme file to get all the authentication keys.