Interactive Brokers provides an Application Programming Interface (API) which you can use to connect to Trader Workstation (TWS) and trade in your IB account. Our API lets you develop your own automated trading strategies using the programming language of your choice.
The API allows you to connect through either TWS or the IB Gateway.
This guide is an overview of the C# interface and makes use of the sample applications provided with the TWS API software to demonstrate the TWS API functionality. It is intended for beginning C# API customers and is complementary to our API Reference Guide. After reading this document, you should have a general overview of the TWS API and will be able to identify which TWS API methods are behind some of the most important functions in the sample applications.
This guide includes the following topics:
This document is not a tutorial and any discussion about API source code provided with the API software has been intentionally omitted. If you are reading this guide, you should be familiar enough with programming so that you can work through the provided sample code. It is outside the scope of this guide to provide detailed step-by-step instructions on how to write a TWS API application. Users who require further assistance are encouraged to read the Building a C# API Sample Application tutorial, which is part of the API Reference Guide.
The process of building and running the sample applications is also not covered in this document. All required project files are provided “out of the box” for that specific purpose.