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njagota Which API to Use?
I primarily need to dowload customer/contact information in small or even individual batches from Salesforce.com into customer's that use our billing system. My first read is that there are 3 APIs or more. I am trying to figure out where to start here, I am at the very beginning of figuring out how to begin access and development.
I will be using visual studio 2008 and programming in VB. I assume that I should be using the Force.com Partner WSDL, but the examples I downloaded appear to be using something called APEX. Any guidance on this and getting started would be MUCH appreciated.
Nimesh
If you are only connecting to your own org then you can use the Enterprise WSDL, which will be easier to use because it will have stubs in it for all the data in your data model.
If you will be connecting your application to others' Salesforce.com instances then you'll want the Partner WSDL.
You can find both of these at Setup | Develop | API.
I'm not sure what examples you're referring to, but if you're trying to connect VB.net to Salesforce.com then the best source of sample code is here.
All the examples I've seen in the official documentation seem to reflect the workings of the Enterprise WSDL.
However if you dig deep enough many on here have blogs that also contain samples for the partner WSDL.
For simplicity it is easier to work with the Enterprise WSDL however the code you create will not be very portable in the long run if as warewolf says you intend on hooking it up to other orgs.
The choice is really down to where the code will be used, eg on how many salesforce organisations it will be hooked up to.
There is the APEX side of things, but unless you really do desperately need to do something complex avoid it, the programming will involve you have to write code on both the server and the client wheras the WDL approach means only writing code on the client.
Thanks for the reply, it was very appreciated. The timing was excellent as I was just about to restart this stalled project. Since I want to create a link between our database application and salesforce that could be used by more than one of our customers, I will dig deeper as you suggest and look to the partner WSDL blogs. I didnt realize that there were those, as I could find them during my first foray into this project.
Cheers!