Tales from a Trading Desk

Over the last few months I’ve noticed an increase in the number of .NET 3.0 projects being undertaken by investment banks. The latest project I’m leading follows this trend by using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Another differentiator is that this project comes with an office at the client’s premises – very unusual for an investment bank. It’s actually quite strange working in a office, and looking out at the rows of desk where the majority of employees/contractors/consultants work. On the one hand it’s easier to concentrate and get on with your work in an office, on the flip side its like working is a fish bowl where everyone who walks passed looks in.

New projects come with the usual day one challenges; getting a network login, wiki/source code/email/etc access, and getting a security pass. Investment banks could easily be rated on a scale of 1-10 for the speed at which access is given. The current client took 3 weeks; the previous client took 1 day. Three weeks of chasing n people on a telephone isn’t my idea of fun.

Another challenge offered by the latest project is that 50% of the team is off-shore. This leads to a number of challenges, not least the inability to have a full team daily stand-up, and the need to be proactive on instant messenger – something I appear to be not bad at 🙂

The first three week or so of this project have been mainly about building a thin slice of the trading application to showcase .NET 3.0 to management/business (the cheque writers). One of the drivers from the business is for this application should provide a cleaner slightly futuristic UI to improve productivity. To achieve these goals the WPF team has a dedicated UI consultant who lives and breathes Expression Blend, providing the team with some very stunning visual effect over and above what the normal software engineer can product in XAML. This is definitely the coolest looking trading application I’ve ever work on.

A colleague on another project asked me today if the visual effects were the only benefit WPF offered over a .NET WinForm application. The answer is categorically a no. In my view one of the main benefits WPF offers is the break between UI (XAML) and business logic (C#). Although I don’t have any statistics I do feel more productive in WPF – possible due to the data binding, styles and control templates offered by WPF. At a minimum WPF should help to eradicate the grey looking screen that most trading applications consist of.

Sidebar: Xceed – Mouse double-click on a row. This solution kind of works, but isn’t ideal and definitely has issues with multiple Xceed DataGridControls. A cleaner solution is to set the ItemContainerStyle of the DataGridControl with a style of TargetType DataRow that contains a EventSetter MouseDoubleClick event.

~ by mdavey on June 28, 2007.

Posted in Uncategorized