It takes 5 minutes to beat cream into butter, write half of your name in Elvish, or create a homemade tattoo gun. Or if you want to get really wild, you could spend your next 5 minutes creating a Windows application to get real-time precious metal quotes. If thats a little too wild for you, you could also live vicariously through us by watching a video of us doing it. But if youre ready to throw caution to the wind and give it a try for yourself, heres how:

Step 1: Start a new Windows application project in Visual Studio using VB.NET as the language. (You can use any language, but this example just happens to use VB.NET.)

Step 2: Create a web reference to http://www.xignite.com/xMetals.asmx?WSDL and call it XigniteMetals.

Step 3: On the Form1 design, drag and drop 2 text boxes, 3 labels, and a button, arranging them as shown in the picture. Give the left-most text box a name of tbMetal and default text of XAU. Give the right-most text box a name of tbCurrency and a default text of USD. From left to right, the labels should be given the following names and default text values: lIntro defaults to Right now , lCosts defaults to costs , PriceLabel defaults to 0.00. The button should have a default text value of Get Quote.

Step 4: Double-click the button to create its click event handler. Then add the following lines of code inside the event handler:

Dim xHeader As New XigniteMetals.Header()

xHeader.Username = “MYAUTHENTICATIONKEY”

Dim XigniteMetalsWebService As New XigniteMetals.XigniteMetals()

XigniteMetalsWebService.HeaderValue = xHeader

Dim Quote As XigniteMetals.MetalQuote = _

XigniteMetalsWebService.GetRealTimeMetalQuote(_

DirectCast([Enum].Parse(GetType(XigniteMetals.MetalTypes), tbMetal.Text), XigniteMetals.MetalTypes), _

DirectCast([Enum].Parse(GetType(XigniteMetals.MetalCurrencyTypes), tbCurrency.Text), XigniteMetals.MetalCurrencyTypes))

PriceLabel.Text = Quote.Rate.ToString(“#,###.00″)

Step 5: Replace “MYAUTHENTICATIONKEY” in the second line of code with your Xignite authentication key. Dont have one? Just sign up for a free trial and use your e-mail address as your initial authentication key.

Step 6: Compile and run.

Congratulations! You might make a lousy tattooed elf chef, but youll be the life of the party with precious metal traders.

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