Hey all, I'm trying to grab and display a friends list from bungies friends list.aspx file: https://www.bungie.net/Stats/LiveFriends.aspx and display them in a desktop application.. VB or something
How would I be able to do this? Does it have anything to do with asp? Are there any tutorials that can show me how to grab and display information?
On
You'll need to fetch the data ("scrape" it) through something like a WebRequest. That will give you the raw HTML or whatever it outputs.
I'm sure, without even looking, that it uses some kind of login as well, which you will have to support. I would guess that involves making a request with the credentials to some page and extract the cookie returned which you will have to pass around. The cookies are passed around as headers.
The first thing you'll have to do is examine the HTML returned and determine how to process it to get the information you want. I would use Chrome and it's excellent developer tools for this, or another browser like Opera or Firefox with similar capabilities. This will also work for figuring out how to handle the session cookie.
If you're really interested about consuming information from Xbox Live, you can apply for the XBL Community Developer program from free here: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/developer/
There you'll be provided with API access that will be quicker and more reliable then parsing data from the Bungie site.