SharePoint 2010 - access information on MySite Host from other site

Question

How can you access or create a list on a My Site host (i.e. a custom WebPart on main.example.com accessing information that is hosted on my.example.com)? I want to have a store for user settings that can be shared between sites/applications (could be a list of links, or favourites, widget settings etc). If the site doesn't already exist for the user (e.g. my.example.com/personal/username) then how can you create it through code alone (rather than them using the 'my content' link in My Site to create it)?

Another example of functionality I want to build is the ability for the user to access items they have tagged, to show in a popup or dropdown (probably grouped under the content type) when they click 'tags and notes' (instead of going to My Site > Tags and Notes).

Answer 1

You can call CreatePersonalSite off the Profile. See: MSDN Documentation

public void CreatePersonalSiteSample()
{
  //get current service context
  SPServiceContext serviceContext = SPServiceContext.Current;

  //initialize user profile config manager object
  UserProfileManager upm = new UserProfileManager(serviceContext);
  string sAccount = "mydomain\\myalias";
  UserProfile u = upm.GetUserProfile(sAccount);
  u.CreatePersonalSite();
  SPSite mysite = u.PersonalSite;
  string myurl = u.PersonalUrl;
}

For Social Tags you can use the SocialTagManager.GetTags method. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.socialdata.socialtagmanager.gettags.aspx