I am new to the Salesforce REST API, and I have a basic authentication question.

The basic structure of my solution is as follows. I am developing a web application (on .NET) that will make calls against the foce.com REST API to insert/update/delete data (leads, accounts, etc.). Our salespeople will use the normal Salesforce website to interact with this data, but our web application will also interact with it via the REST API.

So, what is the proper authentication mechanism to use for my .NET web application? The REST API calls it makes will be unattended, so there is no point in having OAuth redirect to the Salesforce login page for a person to type in credentials. (There will be no person present.)

Is it simply sufficient for me to include, with each REST API call, the "Consumer Key" and "Consumer Secret" values from the Remote Access setup page in my SF DE account?

Thanks in advance.

I am new to the Salesforce REST API (and Salesforce development in general), and I am working to set up my development environment for making/testing calls against the REST API.

In reading over the Getting Started with the Force.com REST API document, it appears that I need a public endpoint with an SSL certificate in place to even do the most basic development prototype (in order to do the OAuth step, which is of course a pre-requsite to all other calls).

Is that right? Is there no way to start developing and testing without setting up a publicly available web server with SSL in place?

Thanks much.

I'm new to Salesforce development, and I'm currently choosing between the SOAP and REST APIs. It seems the .NET integration samples on DeveloperForce are mostly several years old (2005, 2007), and so they only cover the SOAP API. Are there any good .NET code examples out there for the REST API?

Also, in general, does the REST API support a much smaller feature set than the SOAP API, so that I should choose the latter if I want to do things like convert a Lead into an Account via a web service?

Is lead-to-account conversion possible via the REST API? I am new to salesforce development, and choosing between the SOAP and REST APIs. From my first pass through the docs, it seems that the REST API supports a much smaller feature set than the SOAP API - is that right?