First Days at Finetix

I have just left my job as the head of the .NET practice at an 1100-person consulting company, and I have just joined a boutique, high-end consultancy named Finetix LLC. Finetix specializes in financial workstations, and seems to have a very good reputation amongst various Wall Street companies. I was a bix anxious in joining them, so I did my due dilligence, and wrote to every Finetix employee that I could bring up on Google. Amazingly, not one of the former employees who wrote back had one negative thing to say about Finetix. Not one!

My first project is to work on rearchitecting a credit derivatives system for a major financial player. There is an employee-based team on the ground already at this client, and they have done some up front architecture. I hope I am not too late!

They are taking a huge legacy Excel application and making it the typical three-tier application. The app will have a .NET front end (Infragistics-based), and will use Web Services to communicate to the Java server. I sincerely hope that, in the very near future, financial companies throw both feet into the water and do a complete end-to-end .NET solution. Microsoft needs to do a better job of convincing legacy Wall Street players that .NET servers offer comparable performance and (ducking and hiding) security to Unix-based servers.

The team has chosen Liquid XML to map their schemas into PONOs and POJOs. (Plain Old NET/Java Objects). I went to the Liquid site, and unfortunately, they don't have any eval copies. If I decide to take my standard MVC-based approach, I wonder if I can still use datasets for the underlying data representation for the data models., and use common XSDs between ther Microsoft MSDatasetGenerator and Liquid's PONO generator.

I am also hoping to get some exposure to the Spring.NET framework, which my counterparts in the London office are using. Today, I am playing around with Spring.NET. I haven't experienced the nirvana of Aspect-Oriented Programming yet, but I am sure that my colleague Deglan will show me the way. Some of the concepts in Spring are remarkably similar to the last project that I architected, so the concepts are certainly not foreign.


Musical Note : Meshuggah at the Starland Ballroom in New Jersey on October 11th.