Twilio is a great SMS (text message) gateway to use for sending and receiving SMS messages. The process is super simple and flexible to get started using (the Twilio REST API helper library is great). However, in my case, I wanted to access the API through a “windows form” application, but the API needs a little something extra to get this to function. In my experience, a proxy. Below are the steps from start to finish to retrieve messages from your Twilio account:

1. Get a Twilio account.
2. In Visual Studio – run this in Package Manager Console: PM> Install-Package Twilio
3. Use the sample code below to get some of your SMS messages:

using System;
using System.Net;
using Twilio;

namespace testSMS
{
    internal class getSMS
    {
        public void parseSMS()
        {

            var twilio = new TwilioRestClient("yourSID", "yourToken");
            //The below is deeded to remove the json error:
            //"Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: <. Path '', line 0, position 0."

            WebRequest wreq = WebRequest.Create("https://api.twilio.com/");
            IWebProxy iprox = wreq.Proxy;
            iprox.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
            twilio.Proxy = iprox;

            SmsMessageResult msgs = twilio.ListSmsMessages();

            foreach (var smsmsg in msgs.SMSMessages)
            {
                if (smsmsg.Status == "received")
                {

                   //do something with messages, ie: smsmsg.Body
                }
            }

        }
    }
}