AlphaVantage and C#

This short article describes how to use AlphaVantage’s free stock market data API in your C# code.

What is AlphaVantage? AlphaVantage is a free stock market & currency market data feed. To get started, simply sign up with your email address to get your free API key.

How do I retrieve data from AlphaVantage using C#? You have two options:

First option. There are existing C# wrappers written for AlphaVantage. The library I found easiest to work with is LutsenkoKirill/AlphaVantage.Net hosted on GitHub.

To install this library in your project use NuGet command: Install-Package AlphaVantage.Net.Core

Usage example:

public static async Task AlphaVantageCoreDemo()
{
    var coreClient = new AlphaVantageCoreClient();
    string apiKey = "1"; // enter your API key here
    // retrieve stocks batch quoutes of Apple and Facebook
    var query = new Dictionary<string, string>()
    {
         {"symbols", "FB,AAPL"}
    };
    JObject deserialisedResponse = await coreClient.RequestApiAsync(apiKey, ApiFunction.BATCH_STOCK_QUOTES, query);           
    // parse JObject here
}

Second option. Write your own code. This is much simpler than it sounds. I will show you below, how you can retrieve stock market data from AlphaVantage using one line of c# code.

Here is the magic one line C# code, which will retrieve stock market data from AlphaVantage:

To get this running in your own projects, you need to

1. Install ServiceStack.Text ( a free, open-source, high-performance text utility) using NuGet

PM> Install-Package ServiceStack.Text

2. Use below code in your project

Running this code in gistlyn (C# in the browser) produces this result:

Run code live in the browser. Click here to run code

Click here to run this code in gistlyn.

I hope this will be useful for your project. Feel free to leave any comments & I will be happy to answer any more questions.

If you enjoyed this article,

• you might also enjoy my AlphaVantage C# implementation on .NET MVC article
• my other posts on Medium here
• I run excel-automation-guide.com

Thanks

Mark