AJAX For SDP Mobile Access?

Following Finextra’s second Single Dealer Platform (SDP) webcast Paul makes a good case for saying not to AJAX Mobile Access. Xavier provides a good overview of why banks are building SDP’s at the start of the webcast. SDP’s provide more of a relationship to customers than an MDP. Is credit the next push in SDP land from an instrument perspective? Stephane provide an insight in the wide range of clients who may use an SDP.
Internationalization is also hotly debated.

Let’s hope the UX differentiator follows Agile UX recommendations.

SQL Server 2008 Express Mixed Mode Authentication – How to Enable?

I finally found the answer here. Now my problem is that since I installed SQL Server 2008 Express via VS 2010 Ultimate Beta 2, how do I install the Full-text search feature when VS 2010 Maintenance Mode doesn’t appear to know about SQL Server 2008 Express

Real-Time Risk, Is it Achievable?

Spending hours on Eurostar causes one to ponder on “stuff”. Real-time risk has been part of this “stuff”. Natixis has a case study that provides information on how it achieved real-time/intra-day risk coupled with P&L using various products, including Gigaspaces. Like most problems, the solution is either a complete custom build, a product or a hybrid. I suspect however that all real-time risk solutions need an in-memory cube to stand any chance of delivering the data in real-time. It’s a shame Natixis’s case study doesn’t provide a hint as to the latency from booking a trade to seeing the risk update on a traders desktop.

CEP also would appear to be important in the real-time risk space. Aleri Live OLAP is one such product that what offers real-time P&L. Aleri’s CEP engine is pretty good, but I don’t have a view on their Live OLAP server. I believe Aleri have had the Live OLAP product for a while, hence it would be curious to know if they have seen an uptick over the last year. Microsoft might also want to consider how it positions StreamInsight given that the group site inside the SQL Server team – StreamInsight coupled to Analysis Server would at least put them into the Aleri Live OLAP space.

Waters and Buy-Side Technology has an interesting view; “Although real-time risk management is still only possible in theory, the vendor has seen a large increase in interest in this area since the end of February. The firms looking to adopt this type of risk calculation are mostly large and mid-tier banks”.

MacBook Pro – Migration Assistance, VMWare and Windows 7 64bit Ultimate

Tonight I moved from a MacBook to a MacBook Pro using the Migration Assistance (ethernet). On the whole it was a pretty good experience, apart from:

• The Boot Camp partition never made it across – should I be surprised?
• VMWare downgraded itself to 2
• iWork’s can open .docx files – I’m assuming this is because I need a Mac OS X update, which is coming down as I blog

Since my Boot Camp partition died, I decided to move to Windows 7 64bit Ultimate.

Patterns for Parallel Programming and Thoughts on Multitouch

I’ve not downloaded Patterns for Parallel Programming: Understanding and Applying Parallel Patterns with the .NET Framework 4 yet, but suspect its worth a read.

DDJ “Multitouch Gains Momentum” article provides some thoughts on multitouch. The article doesn’t mention that Silverlight also supports multitouch, which is a shame given that RIA’s are the preferred application of choice in certain instances. If you now look at the 10/GUI video, you can begin to see some interesting ideas for the next generation trading desk.

It’s SQL Server Modeling Now!

Purdy has the low down. Let’s see what the PDC 2009 sessions provide.

PDC 2009 Is Near

The PDC 2009 is just over a week away. Looking at the sessions, if I were going (which I’m not ) I’d take a keen interesting in the following:

• Concurrency Fuzzing & Data Races
• Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services
• Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight
• Rx: Reactive Extensions for .NET
• Infer.NET: Building Software with Intelligence – download and samples available here if you want to read up prior to the PDC
• Data-Intensive Computing on Windows HPC Server with the DryadLINQ Framework – DryadLINQ is a cool technology I blogged about a sometime ago. I’m still unclear why Microsoft hasn’t moving DryadLINQ into the HPC land as a full product given its work with PLINQ. Maybe the PDC will make things clearer? (
• Building Hybrid Cloud Applications with Windows Azure and the Service Bus
• Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language
• Future of Garbage Collection
• Scaling Your Data Tier with Microsoft Project Code Name “Velocity” – Velocity is aimed directly at Coherence (Oracle), but maybe Microsoft want to look Gigaspaces, and features such as Process Units.
• Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp
• Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services
• Advanced Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight – having been on a number of conference calls with Roman and Torsten, it would have been nice to finally meet them

Cool Running

Tonights run was better than the last few weeks of running. Primarily I think this is because the temperature has dropped – I seem to run better in colder weather. My 10km PB was set during a -5°C race. I’ve also recently moved to using an iPod Shuffle for running – previously I never ran to music, I just couldn’t get on with Earphones for some reason. My problem now is getting a decent playlist.

Vedea: Interactive Data-Driven Visualizations

Mary Jo provides some thoughts on Vedea. See the Patterns and Practices blog for a few more detail.

RIA IDE Flight: Adobe vs Microsoft

Adobe follows Microsoft.