TIBCO + Silverlight May 1, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , add a commentTIBCO has put its support behind Microsoft’s Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology, according to Infoworld (via TechMeme). Given that Reuters owned TIBCO in the past, and I presume still uses TIBCO technology extensively, I wonder if this means we might see a Silverlight-flavoured version of Reuters 3000 Xtra in the future?
VB macros on Zoho sheet April 29, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a commentInteresting news from Zoho, given that I have previously thought about a runtime for VBA implemented in .Net… Zoho Sheet now has support for VB macros (via TechCrunch). Since this runtime is implemented in Java, I can’t imagine they support ActiveX or COM integration. Also they are an online solution and obviously they don’t support the full set of Excel objects and functions just yet (here’s the list they do support). But its interesting nonetheless that someone has had a run at this idea. Someone make this available as a .Net library please!
Excel, multi-monitors and quant finance
Posted by James Webster in : finance, development , add a commentWhilst working with a couple of spreadsheets this morning I wondered; Why doesn’t Excel have better support for multi-monitor applications? More and more developers have at least two monitors on their workstations these days and practically everyone on a trading desk has Excel running and at least three (probably many more) flat-panels connected to their workstation. Realtime Soft’s Ultramon is a good Windows multi-monitor utility but it doesn’t rearrange the MDI windows within the main Excel frame. Might be something for Resolver Systems to think about… Or perhaps there is an opportunity for someone to write an add-in that beefs up Excel in this regard.
Some links from the intersection between Microsoft technologies and quantitative finance;
- The Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab looks interesting:
The Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab integrates Microsoft Windows HPC Server, a central market data database and Microsoft productivity products to provide university courses with an online service to publish, execute and manage computational finance models.
- I’m looking forward to seeing what the combination of the O’Reilly School of Technology and Wolfram (Mathematica) come up with as well.
- Speaking of Resolver Systems, they recently announced their ‘Quant’ edition. As a software developer, I’m not sure I want to encourage more spreadsheets though
- Will products like Centerspace’s NMath provide a path to enable quants to let go of C++ and jump into the C# world? The NMath suite is a managed wrapper around the Intel Math Kernel Library. They have a some basic benchmarks available here (pdf).