Anyone coding in this dot-net platform ? I was going to purchase Multicharts and then I saw tradelink....which appears to be fairly mature. Anyone with experience in this platform ? I have excellent EasyLanguage skills, but not that great with C#/dot-net. So appears I would have a long and tough row to hoe with Tradelink. Is it worth it ?
Yes it is worth it, a hundred thousand times over. This is a real investment in yourself. Learn a real programming language and free yourself from all these platforms. They're designed to keep you hooked. Make sure that you learn using Visual Studio or SharpDev. Don't try to learn programming inside of a trading platform that "extends" C#. They still have you on the hook that way, with their proprietary libraries. Buy a book such as "Learn C# in 24 days". There are plenty of books (although they're not really geared for trading). We offer a free hands-on introductory course for programming in C#, designed with the trader in mind. It will take you from zero experience to building your own technical indicators in less than a week. Drop us an email to sign up, it's free.
The learning curve is steeper for C languages but once you become proficient, coding up an indicator is much much faster... Steering completely clear of the platforms that provide wrappers is maybe not all that necessary. They all will work with their wrapper functions and with C language code inline, you aren't all that trapped in their environments. You can usually use Visual Studio to compile the code containing both their wrapper functions and straight C stuff...
That's true. For learning purposes, it's good to stick with Visual Studio or something standard before attempting to write add-ins for a platform.
Thanks guys...but here is one more question: How robust of a platform is tradelink compared to say a Tradestation or Multicharts ? Does it have circular buffers built into all of the datafeed symbols for instance ? I remember once someone comparing 50 lines of easy language with a Ninja Trader signal that took over 500 lines of code. Reason: NT had no circular buffer "feature". It had to be written from scratch. Now with just an API like Interactive Brokers, one should not expect this. However, a trading platform should at least support the basics IMHO.
The main issues I had when evaluating TradeLink earlier this year is that every release seemed buggy and there was no "stable" branch (production quality releases), only an "unstable" branch (development quality releases). I also checked into NeoTicker, but its learning curve is pretty high. Their "officially supported" programming languages are pretty old and I wanted an easy dive into C#. I've been enjoying working with C# and NinjaTrader, but I hope to try F# at some point if I begin to use more math operations and maybe less verbose code. I've not experienced any stability problems or major bugs. Most instability may be attributed to poorly coded indicators. I've requested official support for Windows Server 2008 and F#, who knows if it will actually happen. Even though there is room for improvement, NinjaTrader, and their branded IQFeed data feed: Kinetick, seem hard to beat. But they are actively working to meet the needs of their users, it just seems you have to be patient. I can only see this platform getting better.
We can put you in touch with several C# trading system developers. We also offer services starting at $25/hr and up to $55/hr. But if we are too busy to do the work for you, we can certainly refer you to someone. Just drop us an email. Please note this forum is strictly for low level programming languages such as C#, C++, F#, VB, etc., not for products such as TradeLink, which depend on and use proprietary extensions (to place trades, track orders, etc.). That is *exactly* what we are trying to steer clear of. If you have a general question about C# that has nothing to do with a proprietary application, that would be fine to post here. Thank you.
Hmmm....I didn't see that disclosure on their website. Are you indicating that portions of Tradelink use components where the source code is not divulged i.e. "extensions" ?
If you have a general programming question, feel free to post it here. Examples: Bad question: "How do I submit an order through TradeLink?" (TradeLink has a forum for this) Good question: "How do I use the parallel foreach in C# 4.0 to make my technical indicator run faster"? Bad question: "How do I save a chart in StockChartX?" (Modulus has a forum for this at support.modulusfe.com) Bad question: "How do I calculate an indicator with TA-LIB?" Good question: "How can I compile TA-LIB (or TradeLink, or any project) in 64 bit mode?" <-- this is really just a generic programming question. Thank you.