Author Archive

Just forward your trip confirmation emails (from airlines, travel agencies, hotels, whatever) to plans@tripit.com and it sorts it all out into a nicely organized itinerary.

From there it lets you do all sorts of things:

• Pick up your current travel info from your smart phone – just email a query (such as “get flight today”)
• Add a calendar feed of your travel plans within Outlook
• Share your travel information with friends and colleagues

By taking on the fairly simple task of creating structured data (an itinerary) from unstructured (a confirmation email) TripIt adds a huge amount of value.

And there’s no need to go through some horrible “registration” process – you forward it the confirmation emails, it figures out who you are (duh!) from your email address.

Useful, friendly, simple = Awesome.

VersionOne, an Agile project management tool I like a lot, has introduced a software development kit based in .NET.  They also made a nice SDK Reference Toolkit:

A series of sample applications built on the SDK are provided and can be used out-of-the-box or as learning tools to help expedite the custom application or integration development process. A few examples are listed below.

• Task Manager: A task tray utility that allows users to view, update, change ownership and close tasks, tests, defects and stories within VersionOne, saving time by eliminating the need to log into the application.
• Estimator Tool: Many agile development teams use the practice of relative estimation. The tool supports relative estimation by allowing users to easily divide items or features into any number of groupings and quickly apply the same estimated value to all items in each group, accelerating the planning process while removing unnecessary complexity.
• Screenshot Tool: Helps a user capture a screenshot and directly attach the image to an item within VersionOne, without having to first save to disk.
• Attachment Tool: Permits users to easily attach a file to any asset in VersionOne including stories, defects, tasks, or tests.
• SVN Workitem Tool: Helps users add workitem IDs via drag-and drop into the TortoiseSVN, an easy-to-use interface to subversion, virtually eliminating errors when cross-referencing source code check-ins to the associated task or defect in VersionOne.

Download the SDK from the VersionOne Community Site.

For those with questions about the winning entry in the WPF Contest, Szymon is blogging about it here

At the closing keynote of the 2008 Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference in New York, I announced the finalists and winners for the first Lab49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest:

The Grand Prize winner was Szymon Kobalczyk:

The two Finalists were Jacob Carpenter:

and Jobi Joy: 

while the Honorable Mention went to Paul Hounshell: 
 

These applications can all be downloaded from my SkyDrive account:

(link)

Everyone was very impressed with the level of innovation and creativity displayed by these entries. Congratulations to everyone, this was a great competition. 

Lab49’s table at the 7th annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference was a crowd favorite.  I like to think it’s because we’re great people, but perhaps the fact that we had the grand prize to our WPF in Finance Innovation Contest (an Alienware 7500) showing off the contest finalists:

In this show I chatted with Tim Vercruysse, Director - Software Development, Citi/Lava Technology.  We discussed the unique challenges that he faces, being in the financial services industry, and how they differ from what most people mean when they talk about "user experience".  Tim also talked about the main benefits - beyond user experience - that he sees from Silverlight and WPF.  Last, we wrapped up with a discussion of what developers in the financial services industry need to learn in order to stay relevant in this demanding environment.

Listen to the podcast here (Quicktime file link)

I was shopping for a technical book today and saw a new feature on Amazon.com that I’d never come across:

What a cool idea.  Clicking on "See Details" brings up:

And the rest of the explanation under "Get More Details on Amazon Upgrade":

I’m here at Mix08 where I’ve signed on as a guest blogger and podcaster for Zoom-In Online. You can see all of my posts here:

So far I posted a couple about the keynote, including Ray Ozzie and Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager for IE) with plenty more to come.

I’ve heard from a number of contestants who are working on their entries but (work/family/vacation/scrabulous/etc) has gotten in the way and they’d like a bit more time.  Well, we’ve heard you, and we’re extending the submission deadline until March 10th. 

That gives you plenty more time (including TWO extra weekends) to work on your entry before submitting it.

If you’ve already submitted something, don’t worry, you can use the extra time to improve your entry; you can keep submitting new versions right up until the deadline.

Don’t delay, get cracking! No excuses now…

(contest site here; submit here.)

The 6th Annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference is coming up soon - March 12-13 at the New York Marriott Marquis.  The theme of this year’s conference is High Performance Computing, a topic near and dear to my heart.

The conference, as always, is free to attend.  Register here.

ps - Lab49 is a Platinum Sponsor this year and in addition to a very cool talk on distributed data caches, we’ll have a special, never before seen, cocktail ready at the reception for you to try out.

I met these guys this week at the Microsoft Financial Services Partner Summit out in Seattle.  Their product looks neat. 

According to their site it supoprts all sorts of instruments - swaps, swaptions, caps/floors, equities, futures, convertibles, credit & fixed-income instruments, options, mortgages, etc.

I’d be curious if anyone in the market has used it and can comment.

Not in the usual sense of the word, I am now hearing this as a synonym for “training materials”.  As in,

Our field sales reps need to learn about the new SQL Server 2008 product.  Is there any readiness for it they can download?

more Microspeak here

New York Times article speculates:

No one knows how troubled the credit swaps market is, because, like the now-distressed market for subprime mortgage securities, it is unregulated. But because swaps have proliferated so rapidly, experts say that a hiccup in this market could set off a chain reaction of losses at financial institutions, making it even harder for borrowers

and…

last week, the American International Group said that it had incorrectly valued some of the swaps it had written and that sharp declines in some of these instruments had translated to $3.6 billion more in losses than the company had previously estimated. Its stock dropped 12 percent on the news but edged up in the days after.

Something to keep our eyes on.

As many of you know, Lab49 is sponsoring the WPF in Finance Innovation Contest. Over the course of the contest, several people have asked for some resources to learn WPF better.

As it happens a number of our distinguished judges have written excellent WPF books, I encourage you to check them out:

Adam Nathan - WPF Unleashed

Chris Sells - Programming Windows Presentation Foundation

Charles Petzold has actually written TWO books on WPF -
3D Programming for Windows AND Applications = Code + Markup

Our other two judges, Rob Relyea, and Josh Smith, have put together some great resources as well.

Rob has compiled a great list of WPF Books and WPF Resources, while Josh wrote up A Guided Tour of WPF.

Hope this helps & good luck in the contest.

Our WPF Contest has gotten a huge amount of interest not only from those in the U.S. but from many around the world. In the face of incredible demand, we have now updated the contest rules, eliminating the previous restriction to residents of the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

So, all you residents of South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Antarctica - open up your keyboards and get cracking! Deadlines are approaching.

Microsoft Syndicated Client Starter Kit just released on WindowsClient.net :

…a Starter Kit designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content experiences which engage the user, from documents and photos to videos and podcasts.

Jonathan Tigner at ActiveWin.com has the story here.  Yes Jonathan, we’re listening.

Check out this excellent CodeProject submission named "Legion", which is a grid computing ("cycle stealing") framework in Silverlight, by Daniel Vaughan.

Full disclosure: uses graphing component by Lab49’s own Andre de Cavaignac

Over at Aleri’s website, I contributed a piece helping customers sort out some of the decisions around CEP platforms:

When looking at the field of products and determining which to choose, I have seen many of my customers become confused and bewildered about how to even evaluate the various offerings.  Meanwhile, the primary factor most often touted by vendors, journalists, and industry analysts is messages per second (MPS).  However, MPS is not the right aspect to focus on.  There are three basic problems with using MPS to drive purchasing decisions: first, most of the numbers touted in the press and in marketing literature are largely meaningless since they do not account for realistic or consistent use cases; second, at this point almost all of the major CEP products perform at adequate rates for all but the most demanding applications; and third, there are other, more important issues at play.

Read the full article here.

Network World recently interviewed me for their "Prediction Week" podcast series:

As part of our Prediction Week of podcasts, we talk with Daniel Chait from Lab49 (pictured) about the top trends in Web application, development and outsourcing for 2008. Find out whether this year will be the SOA Hangover, and how offshoring will change during the year (18:37).

Listen to the podcast here.

Story here at Securities Industry News.