by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Getting Started with the Salesforce Streaming API in .NET Core

Have you ever wished you could get a notification whenever a record type or subset of records changed in Salesforce? You may wish to be able to be notified of those changes for replicating data or to trigger behavior or an external business system.

Enter the Streaming API from Salesforce. This feature consists of several subfeatures which enable you to just that. Opting in to certain changes is possible with Push Topics. Getting a complete list of changes of everything is possible with Change Data Capture. We’re going to talk about both in this post and how you can integrate your .NET applications with Salesforce to capture those changes in near real-time.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Processing Large Amounts of Data in Salesforce with Bulk API 2.0

Running into limits with your Salesforce REST API usage, or simply proactively looking to process a large amount of data in Salesforce? Due to the limits in place on how many calls you can make to the REST API on a per 24-hour period that may limit how much data you can process an alternative approach is needed. Thankfully, with the Bulk API, you can process up to 100 million records per 24-hour period, which should (hopefully) be more than enough for you.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Understanding OAuth 2.0 Web Server Flow In Salesforce

In this post, we’re going to work on how you can test and develop against Salesforce, using the Web-Server Flow, locally on your machine. As an added bonus, we’ll look at how to make those urls public with ngrok.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Introduction to the Salesforce REST API (using Postman)

This post is going to be a rather lengthy introductory course on the Salesforce REST API. If you’re just looking for the Postman collection, or would like to just follow along, click here. We’ll discuss authentication, basic read operations, SOQL queries, batch & composite queries, and querying with an external key. We’ll also touch on the Salesforce workbench.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Newsletter

Statically Typed Newsletter: Volume 1

Inspired by Tim Ferris’s 5-bullet Friday and Scott Hanselman’s Newsletter of Wonderful Things, I’ve decided this would be a great place for me to share some of the humorous, educational, insightful, or just generally weird things I found online. It could be videos, book recommendations, gadgets, recipes, and so on.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming

Improving Model Validation for Entity Framework Core 2.0

We’re going to review how to work around the frequent and ever present error: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Introduction to Salesforce for Developers

Many people have heard of Salesforce. Right now, you’re probably thinking of a web portal used by sales people to find new customers, maintain accounts, and track opportunities, and you’d be right to think that. Salesforce is a great platform for CRM, but it’s so much more than that.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming

Create Your Own .NET Core Templates in 4 Easy Steps

Do you ever develop prototypes, or starter projects/accelerators, that you’d like to use again in the future? A good way to do that is by creating custom templates for dotnet. Once completed, anytime you want to create a new project of that type in the future, you can use key in “dotnet new ” and you’re off, complete with correct namespaces. You can even do conditional checks, or variable replacements.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming

Exploring Video Games With the New IHttpClientFactory In .NET Core 2.1

REST services are everywhere. It’s tough to find an application that doesn’t leverage an externally hosted REST service in some way. Prior to .NET Core 2.1, a common library that was used to perform REST requests was RestSharp. I love RestSharp, but let’s explore the new alternative IHttpClientFactory that became available as part of .NET Core 2.1.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming

Adding AppSettings.json Configuration to a .NET Core Console Application

This post will walk you through the steps necessary to add a strongly typed appsettings.json configuration file to your console application. I’ll dispense with the formalities of writing a detailed introduction on why you would be interested in doing this and jump right into the steps involved.