So far the only reliable wrapper I've found for this in .Net land is TweetInvi. Try to ignore that the web site looks like it was designed by a hyperactive 10-year old (thanks MS 'metro' team), the actual library is very well designed and rock solid.

Assuming of course you have the relevant access tokens (if not see http://dev.twitter.com), an example of how easy it is to have up and running:

TwitterCredentials.SetCredentials(userToken,userTokenPrivate,apiKey,apiKeyPrivate); _userStream = Stream.CreateUserStream(); _userStream.TweetCreatedByFriend += (sender,args) => Console.WriteLine(args.Tweet.Text); _userStream.Start();

This will write the body of tweets to your console output, and it updates even faster than leaving the actual Twitter web site open. There are other events exposed for when a tweet is favourited, retweeted, when you have a new follower etc.

I can vouch for this library as being reliable - I am using it for my CovertTweeter project and have had absolutely no issues with it. In fact accessing the streaming API through TweetInvi has been even easier than the many brick walls I was left hitting when using REST wrappers like Linq2Twitter and TweetSharp.