A couple of months ago one of my readers asked me to build a stock quote class that would automatically update the quote.
I forgot about it, but then I found the e-mail and decided to give it a go. I started looking for some free services that could provide the data in XML format or something similar that can be easy parsed.
Apparently that does not exist. All the stock sites charge you for that information and I want something free, so that was not the way to go.
Then I read about the Yahoo financial website and that it could be screen scraped fairly easy, so that’s what the class will use.
The class is actually very simple to both use and modify. If the class isn’t exactly what you need, you can just use its screen scraping methods to create your own implementation.
Examples of use
To get the quote for a specific stock, you can call the static Execute method. In this example a text box is filled with the quote:
txtStockQuote.Text = StockEngine.Execute("MSFT").Value.ToString();
You can also hook into the automatic update event, so that you can update a text box every time an update occurs. By default it is every minute.
private StockEngine _Engine;
private void PrepareStockQuote()
{
_Engine = new StockEngine("MSFT");
_Engine.AutoUpdate = true;
_Engine.UpdateInterval = 60000; // 1 minute
_Engine.Updated += new EventHandler(_Engine_Updated);
}
private void _Engine_Updated(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
txtStockQuote.Text = _Engine.Value.ToString();
}
Download
Reddit
Furl Bookmark Murdok:
Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.
