Microsoft Launches .NET StockTrader, Provides Securities Industry With Guidance for Building Scalable Trading Solutions on Microsoft Platform

Today at the 2007 Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Technology Management Conference & Exhibit, Microsoft Corp. announced the release of its .NET StockTrader, an end-to-end sample application based on an online stock trading scenario, along with a technical white paper that provides guidance for developers seeking to create high-performance, scalable and interoperable financial services solutions on the Microsoft® platform.

The .NET StockTrader provides a blueprint for how companies can advance their business through Microsoft’s application platform technologies, including Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF), to create service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions. Because performance and agility are a key concern when building mission-critical applications, .NET StockTrader also includes instructions for performance testing across distributed environments.

“More than ever, securities firms are demanding that their applications leverage existing IT investments, adhere to service-oriented architecture principles, be created in a common development environment, and present an interface that is familiar and easy to use,” said Stevan Vidich, technical architect for capital markets solutions in the U.S. Financial Services Group at Microsoft. “.NET StockTrader addresses those concerns. It was designed to showcase how to implement SOA on Windows Server® and the .NET Framework 3.0.”

.NET StockTrader also illustrates full interoperability with Java-based enterprise systems. In particular, StockTrader can transparently interconnect with IBM Corp.’s Trade Performance Benchmark Sample for Websphere Application Server V6.1. Financial services developers can use StockTrader as a model for building .NET systems that interconnect with IBM’s WebSphere Application Server. Support for Web services standards in WCF provides interoperability, addressing a key requirement in the securities industry. Technologies illustrated by .NET StockTrader application include the following:

• High-performance ASP.NET Web applications based on a logical n-tier, service-oriented enterprise design pattern

• High-performance WCF services, reconfigurable without code change

• Support for different network transports and message encoding formats using WCF

• Loosely coupled message-driven services using WCF and Microsoft Message Queuing

• Distributed transaction services

• Core performance tuning parameters for WCF and .NET to achieve high throughput

• Simple, adaptive load-balanced server clusters for scalability and failover purposes


A complete technical overview of the .NET StockTrader application and more information is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader.

About Microsoft in Financial Services

Microsoft’s Financial Services Group provides software that helps financial firms transform the customer, employee and operations experience so they can maximize opportunities for increased market share and profitability. Microsoft software helps empower people and IT staff within financial firms — and across key focus areas such as advisor platforms, channel renewal, insurance value chain, enterprise risk management and compliance, and payments. Through a combination of Microsoft- and partner-provided solutions, customers enable their employees to turn data into insight, transform ideas into action and turn change into opportunity.

More information about Microsoft’s Financial Services Group can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices.