What comes in the Developers Kit?

[JHStarner]

I have been trying to do some application development where I work, and we are on a month to month with Checkbox at the moment.

We were given some development stuff, which included a documentation folder and a bin folder. In the Documentation, two PDFs, titled CheckBox Architecture Guide, and Web Services Developer. The other file is a .chm file which opens up Windows Help, with CheckBox info listed.

In the BIN folder is the Checkbox.Web.Services.Proxies.dll, which I guess would allow me to use the Web Services commands/methods/functions in a C# program.

Is that THE Developers Kit, or are we missing some stuff? Also, is C# the only resolution I have to be able to use the API, and not have to hard code the SOAP requests into my programs?

[ncushing]

That is the developer kit provided for customers using our CheckboxOnline hosting. It provides access via Web Services to your installation. The developer kit for the installable server product has access to the entire API used by Checkbox, but since that requires direct access to the database, it's not something we can provide to our hosted customers.

In general, you can use any web service client that is capable of creating and decoding SOAP XML requests/responses. I know of a few customers that use PHP, though they have had to work around a couple issues regarding PHPs handling of the SOAP XML messages (The actual issue is that MS web service generates a message that does not quite conform to the schema it generates. MS web service client handles it properly, but some other types of clients don't.).

For now, your best bet is to use the provided proxy client classes in C# or VB.NET. In our Checkbox 5.0 release, currently in development, we plan to expand our services to support plain-old-XML and JSON in addition to SOAP XML.