Tales from a Trading Desk

Moving to WordPress

2005-11-18T22:27:00Z

If WordPress is good enough for Scobleizer, then its probably worth the move. I'm over here now.

Business Cards

2005-11-18T09:08:00Z

Since Finetix is currently re-designing their business cards, maybe they should get Scobleizer involved in the process :)

Microsoft doesn't get TDD

2005-11-18T09:04:00Z

Via Sam.

Orcas - Visual Studio 2007

2005-11-16T08:20:00Z

Blogged by Somasegar who runs Microsoft's Developer Division.

Must Read MSDN Magazine Articles

2005-11-15T08:34:00Z

The last few issues of MSDN Magazine have had a number of excellent articles that in my view are must reads for all .NET developers

.NET 2.0 CAS - software engineers never know enough about security
SUPERASSERT - When John writes, everyone should read
Impact of Low-Lock Techniques - Did you know that .NET 2.0 has a different memory model to the ECMA memory model?
Reliability Features - CLR hosting, ICLRPolicyManager, Safe Handles...
Performance Pitfalls - always worth a re-read, especially when Joel admits Microsoft made a bad design decision.
SpinWaitLock - Jeffrey on concurrency.
OpenMP - C++ land. Also worth viewing the PDC C++: Future Directions in Language Innovation presentation.
Transaction on your class variables - very cool

Eurekster blog on swicki

Skinkers

2005-11-14T09:31:00Z

I see that the BBC and XBox both use Skinkers, and now the sports betting industry is beginning to use the software. Wonder if any investment banks use it? - London Stock Exchange uses it for internal communication.

Sam's War Room

2005-11-14T08:26:00Z

Sam's been blogging about his pure agile team recently. This weekend he posts about his War Room.

Another Sprint, Another Release - we're on the Grid

2005-11-12T07:03:00Z

Yesterday saw the end of another sprint, and a milestone for the current project. We finally managed to get the Informix drivers installed on the UAT grid, followed by a release of the pricing service. This was a major step forwards - it feels like we are on the home straight now. Moving from a custom in-house cluster environment to a commercial grid application has been "interesting" - possible the most diplomatic word I could use. Its been challenging to migrating the C++ codebase together with the replacement of specific services to Java.

Microsoft admits .Net skills shortage

2005-11-10T12:42:00Z

Sorry but Mark Quirk at Microsoft is behind the times on this one. From what I have seen, there has been a shortage of .NET software engineers for the last few years, and it's not getting any better. I suggested a long time ago that Finetix should begin to train .NET developers, since our clients appear to have an appetite for these resources. I'd also point out that paired programming has a lot of advantages in the training/knowledge transfer arena.

Rally finally starts blogging agile

2005-11-10T11:06:00Z

Here

Traders and Software Engineers

2005-11-09T14:15:00Z

A colleague has a few interesting comments about the "good old days". Although Marc is correct in that often there is a degree of separation between the traders and the software engineers, I think he missing the point that there are still lots of software engineers who work extremely closely with the traders. In my current client (different from Marc's), I sit opposite a number of quant type software engineers who are talking daily/hourly to the traders. I know of numerous banks that have software engineers sitting within arms length of the trading desk, or actually on the trading desk usually developing Excel centric or .NET applications in a very extreme development environment. At my previous client, I worked closely with the Equity traders, using extreme and Scum to facilitate the development process.

Blogging in the Financial Times

2005-11-07T11:16:00Z

Here

WinFX Community Technology Preview (CTP)

2005-11-06T07:36:00Z

Are we going to get a refresh of WinFX for Visual Studio 2005 RTM? Unless I'm mistaken, the last WinFX preview was in September for VS 2005 beta 2

LINQ

2005-11-06T07:19:00Z

It was excellent to see Microsoft refresh the LINQ Tech Preview for VS 2005 RTM. LINQ is cool technology. The only downside today is that fact that we will probably have to wait 1+ years to see it released as part of VS 2006-7.

        class Employee
        {
            public Employee(String name, String location)
            {
                this.name = name;
                this.location = location;
            }
            public string name;
            public string location;
        }

            List<Employee> employees = new List<Employee>();
            employees.Add(new Employee("Fred", "LDN"));
            employees.Add(new Employee("Bob", "NY"));

            var nys =
                from e in employees
                where e.location == "NY"
                select e;

            foreach (var names in nys) {
                Console.WriteLine(names.name);
            }

Samples from Microsoft are available here

Web 2.0 API

2005-11-04T10:18:00Z

This site has a pretty good list of API's currently available