For years I’ve been using excel or dynamic SQL to generate SQL scripts to do data loads and updates and to generate IN predicates . For a small number of rows or values this is quicker than importing the required data into SQL Server. A few days ago I idly wondered how difficult it would be to create a SQL Server Management Studio extension to do these jobs directly in SSMS. The answer was quite hard but the results are quite satisfying. Continue reading “Create a SQL Server Management Studio Extension”
Using the Google Maps Distance Matrix API in .Net
Knowing the distance between your staff and students’ locations and your institution has innumerable uses. From timetable planning to calculating the CO2 impact of your organisation. Given a person’s postcode calculating their straight line distance from an address is straightforward but not that useful. Actual driving, cycling or walking distances would be better. Here the Google Maps APIs can help. Continue reading “Using the Google Maps Distance Matrix API in .Net”
Using the Salesforce Metadata API in .Net
The SalesForce Metadata API provides a way of deploying and retrieving customisations in your Salesforce instance such as custom objects. Like with the SOAP API for transactional data the documentation for setting up a connection in C# and .net is not great. So here I’ve outlined the process to connect and retrieve data from the API in this environment. I’ve used Visual Studio 2017 in these examples. Continue reading “Using the Salesforce Metadata API in .Net”
Connect to the Salesforce SOAP API in .Net
C# and the Salesforce Partner API
In general the Salesforce API documentation is excellent but I found the sample code for connecting via C# to be unhelpful at best. So here’s a full guide to connecting to the Salesforce Partner API in C# and dot Net. I’ve used Visual Studio 2017 in these examples. Continue reading “Connect to the Salesforce SOAP API in .Net”
Downloading Blackboard Data from Snowflake DB in .NET
Blackboard Data provides access to data about activity on your Blackboard LMS via the Blackboard reporting stack. The data is stored in a Snowflake data warehouse instance. Here you can query the data directly via the Snowflake console or connect a reporting tool such as tableau or Power BI. But what if you want to export the data out of snowflake, for example to an institutional data warehouse. There are number of ways to do this but .NET is my preferred platform so that is what I’ll be using. The Snowflake documentation on this makes the task look quite confusing- but actually it’s very straightforward. Here’s how to connect to and download from Snowflake to an on premise SQL Server instance. Continue reading “Downloading Blackboard Data from Snowflake DB in .NET”