Using the Shopify API from .NET

If you're looking for a way to talk to Shopify from .NET (either C# or VB.NET), you'll probably come across this "lightweight" .NET client.

Word of warning: it's 10 MB, and pretty hard-core.

If you're writing a private app (as opposed to a public one), things are much simpler; you don't need all the OAuth stuff for starters. After a bit of trial and error, I got this to work:

	public string GetCustomers()
	{
	const string url = "https://your-store.myshopify.com/admin/customers.json";
	var req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
	req.Method = "GET";
	req.ContentType = "application/json";
	req.Credentials = GetCredential(url);
	req.PreAuthenticate = true;
	using (var resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse())
	{
	if (resp.StatusCode != HttpStatusCode.OK)
	{
	string message = String.Format("Call failed. Received HTTP {0}", resp.StatusCode);
	throw new ApplicationException(message);
	}
	var sr = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream());
	return sr.ReadToEnd();
	}
	}
	private static CredentialCache GetCredential(string url)
	{
	ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3;
	var credentialCache = new CredentialCache();
	credentialCache.Add(new Uri(url), "Basic", new NetworkCredential("your-api-key", "your-password"));
	return credentialCache;
	}

view raw ShopifyApiDotNet.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

To generate an API key and password, go to http://your-store.myshopify.com/admin/apps, and click "Create a private API key" at the bottom.

Finance packages finally synchronising with UK banks

... so when did that happen?  This is an absolute killer feature for UK users, hats off to moneydashboard.com.

Just enter your customer number and password (you trust them, right?) and they do the leg work: automatically downloading statements, importing transactions, setting categories, etc.

So you just get to look at pretty graphs of your money disappearing.

The winner of worst online finance package has to be a tie between Buxfer (who can’t even get my balance right) and lovemoney.com, who should have spent as much effort on the app as they did on the error screen I got when registering.