Microsoft has created a sample online stock trading application to persuade the securities industry that its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and .NET technologies can be used for high-performance applications within a service-oriented architecture.
At the 2007 Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Technology Management Conference & Exhibit, Microsoft released .NET StockTrader, a sample application based on an online stock trading scenario. It also released a technical white paper that it says provides guidance for developers seeking to create high-performance, scalable and interoperable financial services solutions on the Microsoft platform.
Microsoft says .NET StockTrader provides a blueprint for how companies can use its technologies, such as WCF, to create service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions. It 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."
Microsoft says .NET StockTrader also illustrates full interoperability with Java-based enterprise systems. In particular, StockTrader can transparently interconnect with IBM's Trade Performance Benchmark Sample for Websphere Application Server V6.1.
Technologies illustrated by .NET StockTrader application include the following:
- ASP.NET Web applications based on a logical n-tier, service-oriented enterprise design pattern
- 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
- Load-balanced server clusters for scalability and failover purposes