I am taking this time off to try to learn some technology that I have been planning on learning, but have not had much time to dive into. Two of these technologies are WPF and Prism. For the past few years, I have been managing teams that have been using WPF and Prism, but when I have had to write GUIs myself, I have fallen back to the old comfort zone of Winforms.
When I was Chief Architect for Equities at Citi, I was asked to make a call on the future GUI technology of the Citigroup Investment Bank. After a lot of thought, I recommended the use of WPF. The recommendation was certainly not made for performance reasons, and it was not made because of any extra features that WPF had over Winforms. It was made so that Citi would be able to retain its developers. As techies, we want to be involved in the latest and greatest of technologies. We don’t want to be perceived as dinosaurs when it comes time to changing jobs. I have seen the effects on developers of companies who do not move to the latest technologies. Developers will naturally migrate to companies that will challenge them technically. So, in order to preserve the “forward moving outlook” that I was trying to promote in Equities, I chose WPF for the future direction. But I wasn’t convinced.
However, now I see that almost everyone in Capital Markets has moved to WPF. A lot of the time, you have a WPF shell that contains Winforms-based grids. WPF-based grids just can’t match the performance of Winforms grids. And, grids are everything.
I have never been totally comfortable with the thought of marrying WPF and trader workstations. Most trader workstations that I have seen are just a bunch of grids. Traders use the grids to monitor the market and put in the trades. Research and analytics are mostly done on Bloomberg. If you want to look at some charts, you will use your Bloomberg workstation.
The main difficulty in writing quote blotters is how to handle a large number of quotes. If you have a trader who is dealing with ETFs, the trader needs to be able to monitor the ETFs as well as the components in the underlying basket. This means that a quote blotter could potentially have hundreds of quotes in each tab, and several thousand quotes being monitored simultaneously. It would be interesting to see if a totally WPF-based workstation could be written that would keep up with this kind of flow.
In order to learn WPF and Prism, I have started to write a POC from scratch. I wrote a level 1 quote simulator that can push quotes out at varying speeds, and I have the quote collection data-bound to a standard Microsoft WPF DataGrid control. Over a small range of quotes, the speed seems acceptable. I have not yet explored ways to speed up the grid and to handle a high volume of quotes. I will need to start using unbound columns, implement a ring buffer of last-value caches, use more intelligent updating, use virtual grids, and start examining the use of small objects and garbage collection. All of these improvements are standard when writing GUIs to process real-time data. But I want to dive deep into WPF before going horizontally and writing these optimization.
Next up is to write a Level 2 quote simulator and to write a depth-of-book control.
Should Wall Street give up on WPF? No, not at all. I have seen some beautiful applications written totally in WPF. The old Lighthouse CEP system at Citi is one example of a beautiful and compelling GUI that is totally WPF-based. And, there were enough challenges overcome in writing the GUI where I feel that the GUI developers on this Lighthouse team are some of the very best WPF developers on Wall Street.
I would love to find out what everyone’s experiences with WPF have been in your work in Capital Markets. Please take the time to send some comments here.
©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.
When I was Chief Architect for Equities at Citi, I was asked to make a call on the future GUI technology of the Citigroup Investment Bank. After a lot of thought, I recommended the use of WPF. The recommendation was certainly not made for performance reasons, and it was not made because of any extra features that WPF had over Winforms. It was made so that Citi would be able to retain its developers. As techies, we want to be involved in the latest and greatest of technologies. We don’t want to be perceived as dinosaurs when it comes time to changing jobs. I have seen the effects on developers of companies who do not move to the latest technologies. Developers will naturally migrate to companies that will challenge them technically. So, in order to preserve the “forward moving outlook” that I was trying to promote in Equities, I chose WPF for the future direction. But I wasn’t convinced.
However, now I see that almost everyone in Capital Markets has moved to WPF. A lot of the time, you have a WPF shell that contains Winforms-based grids. WPF-based grids just can’t match the performance of Winforms grids. And, grids are everything.
I have never been totally comfortable with the thought of marrying WPF and trader workstations. Most trader workstations that I have seen are just a bunch of grids. Traders use the grids to monitor the market and put in the trades. Research and analytics are mostly done on Bloomberg. If you want to look at some charts, you will use your Bloomberg workstation.
The main difficulty in writing quote blotters is how to handle a large number of quotes. If you have a trader who is dealing with ETFs, the trader needs to be able to monitor the ETFs as well as the components in the underlying basket. This means that a quote blotter could potentially have hundreds of quotes in each tab, and several thousand quotes being monitored simultaneously. It would be interesting to see if a totally WPF-based workstation could be written that would keep up with this kind of flow.
In order to learn WPF and Prism, I have started to write a POC from scratch. I wrote a level 1 quote simulator that can push quotes out at varying speeds, and I have the quote collection data-bound to a standard Microsoft WPF DataGrid control. Over a small range of quotes, the speed seems acceptable. I have not yet explored ways to speed up the grid and to handle a high volume of quotes. I will need to start using unbound columns, implement a ring buffer of last-value caches, use more intelligent updating, use virtual grids, and start examining the use of small objects and garbage collection. All of these improvements are standard when writing GUIs to process real-time data. But I want to dive deep into WPF before going horizontally and writing these optimization.
Next up is to write a Level 2 quote simulator and to write a depth-of-book control.
Should Wall Street give up on WPF? No, not at all. I have seen some beautiful applications written totally in WPF. The old Lighthouse CEP system at Citi is one example of a beautiful and compelling GUI that is totally WPF-based. And, there were enough challenges overcome in writing the GUI where I feel that the GUI developers on this Lighthouse team are some of the very best WPF developers on Wall Street.
I would love to find out what everyone’s experiences with WPF have been in your work in Capital Markets. Please take the time to send some comments here.
©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.
1 comment:
Hi,
Do you think the emergence of Jupiter of Windows 8 will change your idea of WPF as the future GUI technology?
Thanks
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