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.

Inside Goldman Sachs

The Sunday Times are an interesting article on Number 85 Broad Street.

Artificial Surf Reef: Bournemouth

Last week was a tough week (due to travel) at work so a colleague send me this:

Then I saw in The Sunday Times that finally the Bournemouth reef was open!

FIXatdl

A colleague recently pointed me at FIX Algorithmic Trading Definition Language (FIXatdl). The new language will allow broker-dealers to specify algorithmic order types in an industry standard XML format, enabling Buy-side clients to access new order types within a significantly reduced timeframe. Similar to the way an Internet browser can render a standard HTML page, Buy-side systems will be able to read the new standard XML files and render new order entry screens, using common “look and feel” elements and layouts that may be completely specified and individualised locally.

With the increase in algo trading (I believe this has somewhat increased during the credit crisis) coupled with the low-touch channel trader usage FIXatdl will aid the whole User Experience (UX) around algo trading by providing dynamic screens – I suspect there are quite a few WPF OMS’s that will implement FIXatdl render’s. atdl4j (Java tools for FIXatdl) is also also available on Google Code.

Microsoft ISU Conference and Heathrow Express

So yesterday I presented at the Microsoft ISU conference. I think the presentation (“Next Generation eTrading with Silverlight”) went overtime somewhat, but at least it generated some interesting questions. Only only real downer about the conference was the fact that it was out at Terminal 5, and hence I used the Heathrow Express to get there. Heathrow Express markets that you can stay connected during the journey with T-Mobile HotSpot; unfortunately I couldn’t connect during both journeys

Stuff to read:

• Dynamic Method Bags
• Walkthrough: Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0
• C# can now consume indexed properties
• CLR V4: Profiler Attach Basics With Sample Code
• Bindable Run
• What’s new in Beta 2 for the Task Parallel Library?

VS/.Net 4 Beta 2 Survey

The VS team want feedback. I’ve given mind. If you read this blog, you should be able to guess the Number 1 item I want resolved.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), Where’s it Going? Has .NET Reactive Framework Won?

The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) space appears to have gone very quite, or I’ve missed something – which is always possible. Even the blog has nothing interesting to say From a VS 2010/.NET 4 perspective, its nowhere to be seen, yet Rx is going places.

A colleague voice the view that is you look at CCR from the perspective of coordination, events arrived at ports, arbiters sitting on these ports which then run continuations where specific conditions have been met – these continuations can be anonymous delegates or named delegates. The ports and the arbiters provided a composable reactive framework. The Reactive Framework (Rx) achives the same thing, you can map IObservable to Port (see staceyw comment) and the composable arbitration takes the form of the standard query operators.

Thoughts on Model-Based Testing (MBT)

There’s quite a bit of chatter on Model-Based Testing (MBT) these days primarily due to the release of Spec Explorer among other Microsoft blog postings. MSR help with its recently release Model-Based Testing of Web Applications using NModel publication.

The Spec Explorer Team Blog provides a good overview of what MBT is, coupled with the now standard accompanying C9 video and history of Spec Explorer project. There is even a book on MBT from the MSR team.

The MSR publication talks about using MBT against a web application as does the .NET Journal publication.

If you install Spec Explorer you’ll find 6 samples. Of interest is the Chat sample which provides a view of how to use MBT with regards to a web-streaming server such as Lightstreamer/my-Channels. Effectively one could build a model to logon, rfq and logoff using Spec Explorer

Multiple AppDomain Container – System.AddIn?

A colleague asked me today about building a multiple appdomain container. I recalled blogging about this sometime ago, but couldn’t find the posting hence here’s are a few thoughts on the subject.

The classic scenario is that you want to build a WPF application, but want to AppDomain isolation between components to ensure that one component doesn’t bring down the entire container (application). An example might be a container displaying market data, market news, analytics and research, plus of course the ability to trade. If market news crashes, you still want to continue trading.

Managed Add-in Framework (MAF – System.AddIn.dll) is probably the solution. The CLR Add-In blog has a posting “AppDomain Isolated WPF Add-Ins” which deals with this very issue. Daniel has a C9 video here on MAF. There are also a number of other postings that deal provide further examples here, here, here, here and here.

Samples are available on CodePlex here.

Finally, good old MSDN Magazine has two articles on .NET Application Extensibility – 1 and 2.

Sidebar: Building Dynamically Extensible Applications
AppDomains, Dynamic Code Generation, and Code Level Security