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tx413, what is your level of experience or training that allows you do as you describe? For someone such as myself, and seemingly Jura, we are at ground zero in terms of our knowledge and experience with .NET and C#...
Hopefully someone can find a workaround to this so that we can develop and compile (at least to see if no code errors) within Visual Studio 2010/2012. I've just requested beta access so hopefully I can get in and play around with this aspect..
Thanks for your insightful comment tx413, much appreciated.
Can you say something about MC .NET compared to NinjaTrader? Do you have a preference for one over the other?
I'm a newbie on this, so I might be completely wrong here , but I don't think that's needed. For example, NinjaTrader files can't be compiled in Visual Studio, but the Visual Studio error highlighting works just as it would in the NinjaScript Editor.
I've been coding C# since it was in beta back in 2000. Since then I've gradually moved more towards team management, so I'm certainly not a C# guru, but I'm proficient.
As Jura said, even though you can't compile, you can still use the VS editor. It has better syntax and type checking and better highlighting. It also has easier access to class definitions and other things via the context and help menus.
That's always been a tough call. Before MC .NET, it was almost a toss-up. Ninja has C# and you can do almost anything with it, including adding menu and toolbar items and more in-depth stuff. But Ninja just does not look like a mature product to me; the look and feel barely compares to Multicharts. And it crashes every now and then. And the database gets messed up sometimes. And it drops the broker connection at weird times without recovering, which makes automated trading almost impossible. I could go on and on about the things that I don't like about Ninja, but it actually has been my trading platform of choice for awhile simply because of the C#.
Multicharts has its own issues that bother me, but in my mind it is now the winner and I will most likely be switching to it full time when it is out of beta.
If you are a trader first, programmer second, you will have a chance to code your indicators in MC.NET
If you are a trader first... family man second, hobby third... programmer a distance somewhere on the horizon, you do not have a chance with MC.NET. Forget it now. Don't even think about it. Don't kid yourself. Don't waste your time. MC.NET is NOT for you. Furthermore, for those non-programmer dreamers: if you cannot code in Easylanguage, don't bet on MC.NET, it is not going to be easier.
ps. There are always exceptions. Feel free to be the exception. There is nothing that says you cannot/should not be the exception.
Bottom line, from what I can tell, is that MC .NET offers you 2 things trading-wise that you cannot get from EasyLanguage: (1) you can access data from all instruments, regardless of what is included on your chart. (2) you can access data from the order and position manager windows.
That means you do things like graph your equity curve or chart your risk. You can also create multi-instrument and multi-time-frame indicators and strategies (which you can do in EasyLanguage by adding all those instruments to your chart).
If you can't tackle .NET right now, hopefully you don't need these features, or can work around them. Like I said earlier, the look and feel of MC .NET is exactly the same as regular MC.
Understood. However, NinjaTrader files can be correctly set up to compile with VS (it just takes some undocumented hacking - mainly via having the correct .DLL references in place from NinjaTrader's Program Files directory). Of course the NT team discourages against this, but it is possible
I didn't get accepted into the MC.NET beta because they said today its considered closed despite being a month away from going public apparently. Guess I'll have to wait before I can play with it for now..
Thanks tx413 for your comments. I'm glad that MC .NET is the 'winner', since that would also be my first choice. Btw, do you happen to know other retail C# based trading programs? OpenQuant has a limited R&D budget (so I expect they have less programmers), and Wealth-Lab seems not a 'professional product' to me (but I might be mistaken). Besides that, I don't know of others.
You say that you can do almost everything in C# with NinjaTrader. How does that work with MC .NET in practice? I'm wondering since NT is natively written in C#, while MC uses C++, so I assume somewhat naively that with MC .NET less things are available / accessible in the language. Or did they properly ensure that practically everything is accessible?
Regarding the first point, does that also messes up the chart scaling (like it does in regular MC)? For example, if you add a 1 tick to a 10 min chart, the scale is completely unreadable in normal MC. It would be very nice if MC .NET loads this additional data series 'behind the scenes' without affecting the chart's axis.
Are there other things that MC .NET can do that PowerLanguage / regular MC can't ? For example, with MC .NET you can also monitor for broker disconnects right? As an amateur to C# I can see that the programming language is clearly more advanced, but I struggle somewhat to see how this might be implemented for more advanced features.
