Developers who are working with the Microsoft .NET Framework in financial services now have a very focused guide – “Practical .NET for Financial Markets,” by Yogesh Shetty and Samir Jayaswal.

“I have read a lot of books, and this is very different and very impressive,” said Stevan Vidich, senior technology specialist for capital markets at Microsoft. “The book is everything I had hoped for and then some. It is intended for experienced .NET developers that want to learn how to use .NET development to solve business problems in the Trading Value Chain.”

Shetty said that he and Jayaswal decided to write the book because they could see that no focused literature existed for financial services developers building applications on .NET.

Books were about .NET, or they were about finance, but nothing addressed .NET in finance.

“In their book,” said Microsoft’s Vidich, “every chapter starts with an overview of the business process followed by technology mapping that includes a lot of detailed C# source code. It is not a book that explains how to learn .NET programming; it assumes decent knowledge of .NET programming. It is truly unique in its approach to focus on Capital Markets business and explain how to apply .NET programming to the business issues.”

Shetty has nine years experience designing solutions for the front- and back-office operations in financial firms, the last three working at a large investment bank on Wall Street.

He has seen Microsoft’s role in the financial enterprise expand, he said, from providing a good graphical user interface to running the servers that are the heart of the financial enterprise, such as options market making and algorithmic trading.

“The problem with algorithmic trading is that it is more of a strategy. From the vendor you get a ready-made algorithm so most systems are developed in-house using .NET,” Shetty said.

Older technology managers still prefer Java, but .NET is gaining ground, he said, and is meeting the demands of the options marketplace. The book is meant to provide insights into the practical, day-to-day challenges posed by domain-specific issues. The authors integrate problems and solutions including the business and the technology in each chapter. To make the points explicit, they have usually included the code for a small prototype.

“I am a hard-core technical guy with nine years designing solutions for front offices and back offices,” said Shetty. He spent the last three at a large investment bank on Wall Street, while Jayaswal is, in Shetty’s words, a hard-core business guy.

“We know the market, so we prepared the proposal and pitched it,” he said.

Writing the 500-page book took them a year, and since they were both working fulltime, it required long weeks of very long days.

“I wish there were banks that could loan time instead of money,” added Shetty.