IB TWS – Forever up! Fixing disconnect routine

Imagine you need to create an algo tool that should work with Interactive Brokers through Trading Workstation API. Nothing complex, right – so, you develop the tool, test it using the paper account, all goes smoothly and you’re ready to go live. However, once done…

Silverlight to HTML5

A while ago we faced a task of converting Silverlight front-end application into HTML5. Apart from the fact that app was 100% based on Silverlight 5, it used third-party components like Telerik, KML files read/write utilities, Spatial data processing utilities, MS Map Controls, PRISM (MS…

Slow JQuery hide and show

Very often it is very important for UIs in web apps to show and hide blocks of content. However, it turned out that iPad-versions of the same menus work about 1 second longer than desktop versions of the same web app. Real-life variations can be…

Create stock charts based on Yahoo! Finance? Piece of cake!

We needed to build a dynamic chart with some historical stocks data showing a daily performance of individual stocks, indices, and portfolio. HighStocks js lib was chosen, and Yahoo! Finance was used to get historical EOD data for NASDAQ stocks to minimise support costs for…

Fighting with Knockout.js as performance is our everything

There is a legacy Java web app that we keep enhancing and improving for our beloved client. This application obtains various kinds of information from social networks via RESTful APIs and presents that information as timelines. At the moment with an increase in the amount…

Multithreaded TWS MFC application: Yes or No

Multithreading is a nut for several years by now. This is the only way to achieve scalability: CPU clocking is close to limit. There are a lot of cookbooks explaining how to build multithreaded applications properly. The only issue is that building a block of…

IB Gateway API – Writing algo in a different way

We were implementing a basket trading application with execution through Interactive Brokers Gateway API. Among major features, we had to implement a recuperation of current cash balances and specifying security type for correct symbol matching. Trying to implement the algo logic, we suddenly stuck into…

Ordnance Survey – Map Usage Specifics

While developing a routing engine for a journey planner solution on top of Ordnance Survey mapping data, we faced several challenges and limitations. Here are some of them: Responses from server when dragging the map: Problem: When you drag and drop map too fast, the…

HMRC Gateway API – Optional is Not Necessarily Optional

As a part of our business and industry expertise, we program a number of HMRC tax reporting solutions, which utilize GovTalk, for our clients. In the request message there are two optional parameters: TransformationSpecified and CorrelationID. The system was developed by our über-senior guy Alex….

Generating images from PDFs

As we have quite a staff of programmers, we often run into various technical challenges that bring us joy when we overcome them. Today I am going to write about one such recent challenge and how we solved it. We were developing a complex solution…