Our Surface showed up this week and we had fun unpacking it and setting it up yesterday.
Now, on to the real fun - developing apps for it!
It is something that we encounter frequently. In fact, many of us suffer from this syndrome without being aware. Not sure if you already infected? Take this simple test:
Go back and try to remember when was the last time you woke up one day with a brilliant idea: you were going to build “wheel 2.0”! While innovation is our driving force, try to remember if before you started to work on your new wheel, you stopped and asked yourself one simple question: “Why?”
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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.
Ok, this is cool.
This morning, we are announcing the first-ever "WPF in Finance Innovation Contest". WPF has enormous potential in finance, to affect the way we visualize and interact with the complex, fast-moving sea of data within the industry. To help spur innovation within this new area, we’re holding a contest with great prizes, challenging developers to build interesting new applications to visualize and interact with financial data.
We’ve got an amazing panel of WPF luminaries to judge the entries. We’ve lined up over $15,000 in prizes for the winners and early entrants. And the top 3 finalists will get to appear on stage at next year’s Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference to showcase their app to the world.
So, we’ve done our part.
Now go do yours - sign up and submit your entry.
Sunset view over New York harbor & the Statue of Liberty, taken Thursday November 29th:
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Nice hat tip from Jacqueline Emigh over at Windows in Financial Services, who refers to this blog as “A Compendium of Collaborative Innovation” in her “Best of the Blogs” piece. I like the sound of that. Thanks, Jacqueline!
Here at Lab49 the founders take pride in the fact that as a company we are very easy to work with. Being easy to work with is an important dimension for measuring potential technology vendors that is often overlooked. Recently I have been working with quite a few vendor products and one particular experience has reminded me of the importance of of this critical dimension.
I want to put together a Wednesday night talk, but I’ve dabbled in so much technology recently that I’m having trouble deciding on a topic. Here are the topics I’m thinking about so please let me know which ones you prefer:
Windows Presentation Foundation Fundamentals - How to get started with WPF
Windows Communication Foundation - Why is it better/different than ASP.Net, WSE, Remoting, etc?
Linq and C# 3.0 - MS finally brings OO persistence support to the table
Databinding in Windows Presentation Foundation - How to get your data onto the screen in an easy way
You just found it! Senior Engineer - Trading Software Development at Lab49, Inc.
I’m not doing any more projects without a proper app server! For reasons of various resource vagaries, I have been on two projects now where the server side dev team was inadequate or missing. Thus the client team had to adapt to whatever format the data feeds were available in, and kind of stitch stuff together. The upshot of this is that all kinds of middleware that belongs in the app server gets written in C#. For a trading system, that means that the performance requirements of the C# app become extreme, since you end up drinking from the market data firehose - good for your profiling chops, bad for your nerves… Finally got a good app server in place that can do data compression and feed data at a logical rate (like 10Hz) instead of having to deal with 100s of updates a second. If you find yourself in this position, insist on an app server - even if you have to write it yourself
Recruitment is always an interesting process. Marie provides some points - 9 is a must in my book.
Marie in the Lab49 London office blogs.
Debugging during “Design Mode”
Recently I discovered that you can actually debug the visual studio’s designer. The need for something like usually started when you drag & drop and control on your window and you get some weird message in the taskbar or some scary messagebox. To try to figure out what causing this problem you can try the following: Read the rest of this entry »
One of our projects was written up on the MSN “IT Decision Center”. Lab49 Delivers .NET Ecommerce Solution
