I use the fantastic AbstractSpoon ToDoList for task tracking. I recently discovered the exist.io personal metrics app and wanted to track my daily completed tasks.

I created an integration to do just that, and used it as an opportuniy to do a little development in .NET Core. You can find exist-spoon on my GitHub page.

The exist.io API is simple to work with. The only tricky part was implementing the OAuth authenticaiton flow on a console app. OAuth requires you to serve a page where the user’s browser will be redirected after completing the authorization. This page accepts the token provided by the parter (exist.io in this case).

There is no HttpListener in .NET Core, so I started from the web application skeleton and stripped everything down as much as possible. As usually happens with async work, I wrote way too many Task<T> and awaits before arriving at the final, simpler structure. I punted on the TDL file format and used a simple regex to parse out when a task has DONEDATE equal to today.

The tool isn’t too complicated, but it’s gotten my juices flowing after a while without working on personal projects. It was cool to get a shoutout from one of exist.io’s creators (Hi Josh!) too.