Why the blog is of interest:

Quite often, bloggers inside the financial services community link to - and even react to - the jottings of other bloggers. Bloggers also post the responses of their own readers. In a blog called "Powers Unfiltered," John Powers, president and CEO of Digipede Technologies, gives his reaction to computing consultant Marc Adler's entry on the Magmasystems blogspot about the growing demand for grid architectures in financial services. (See "Microsoft's Intensifying Moves into Financial Grids" elsewhere in "Best of the Blogs.")

As John views the grid market, developers in financial services are much more open to the .NET architecture than IT managers. "Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop their applications (.NET, COM, or anything else) find the Digipede Framework SDK provides the most natural approach available for adapting their applications to grids. And it's free, as part of the Digipede Network Developer Edition. Check it out, .NET developers - it might just be your ticket to 1,000 pounds a day!" he maintains.

"(Digipede and Microsoft) are also working together to win over the IT guys. With the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE), Microsoft has made the deployment and administration of many servers as easy as one (and dropped the price for compute-grid deployments, too.)" As you might expect, this posting drew some diverse feedback from readers.

The Digipede executive also writes about a lot of other topics related to partnering with Microsoft. In another blog entry, entitled "Clubbing with Steve," John tells about attending a reception at Club 21 in New York City with Steve Ballmer and some financial services execs. "Indeed, the continued positive attitude at Microsoft toward partners overall is most heartening. There's still plenty of room for improvement - but the commitment to that improvement is evident, even at the highest level," according to the blogger.

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Why the blog is of interest:

The demand for grid computing keeps climbing faster in financial circles. Yet Windows faces plenty of entrenched competition in this space from other environments. In the Magmasystems blogspot, however, third-party computing consultant Marc Adler points to some arising technologies that could give Microsoft a big boost in financial grids, including Microsoft Accelerator and the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE).

"It will be nice to get first-class support from Microsoft as far as development tools go," according to the consultant.

Marc bases some of his observations on recent trips to Seattle  --where he met with Microsoft Accelerator team members about the future of their technology -- and to London.  

"The Accelerator team claims that (Accelerator) can be used as an abstraction for multicore technologies. The guys from the Accelerator team also predict that the world will eventually be moving to massively multi-core machines (i.e.: Intel's 80 core processor)," Marc writes in one blog entry.

"Got together (in London) with some ex-colleagues, who were marveling at the London consulting market," he relates in another posting. "The hot area are (in) grid computing, with the prevalent stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily (consulting) rates for qualified individuals are about 100 pounds, (which) at the current exchange rates is about $2,000.

"It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Cluster Server and (software tools vendor) Digipede can make any inroads into this market. There seems to be very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007."

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Why the blog is of interest:

More and more these days, financial traders are software developers, too. As a group, these traders constitute some of the busiest -- and most brilliant -- bloggers around. Karl Schulze, a 22-year-old manager/engineer at a robotics company, has now launched a particularly noteworthy blog encompassing, in his words, "the development of an Automated Trading System," along with robotic technologies, Web site creation, a kite aerial camera system, and a few other types of "ramblings from a young dinosaur."

Despite the eclectic nature of the blog, a lot of the content is specifically related to Microsoft's own C# development language.  Karl, the recent recipient of a master's degree in engineering from Cornell University, gives you the nitty gritty on how to use C# to create a simple trading infrastructure and an intraday historical stock viewer. Beyond strictly professional pursuits, however, he's also exploring how to write an application in C# that's unabashedly socially oriented.

In one of the postings on his "Dinosaur Technology and Trading Blog," Karl tells how he's developing a C# FTP image uploader aimed at letting wedding guests upload their digital images to a central Web site. "In an ideal world, I would set up a Web site which we would hand out to all of our guests. They would go to the site and simply drag and drop their files on to the server much like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly, shown below," he elaborates.

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Why the blog is of interest:

Bloggers from Microsoft are shining behind-the-scenes insights on to a vast range of subjects pertinent to financial services pros (and others.) These bloggers hail from a variety of different walks of life, too. On the Windows Live Spaces Web site, Kurt Shintaku, a Microsoft principal systems engineer in southern California, gives us insider glimpses into Vista pirating, the new Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, and Silverlight Streaming, an emerging technology, now in alpha, for delivering multimedia without worrying about bandwidth scalability or storage capacity.

Kurt also posts content of specific importance to the financial services crowd, including descriptions of Microsoft's current series of Financial Services IndustryCasts.  Upcoming Webcast topics will include Windows ATMs, grid computing for .NET, and more. 

In one of the many other entries in his copious blog, Kurt tells about a letter from a customer asking for suggestions on whether to use an apparently pirated copy of Vista, which the customer has received from China. The Microsoft engineer warns that, without a genuine edition of Vista installed, you can't download either reliability, performance, or functionality fixes or add-ins such as Powershell for Vista and Windows Mobile Device Center components.
 
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