i used pico actually

I do all of my editing and coding in the Ninjascript editor. I do have Visual C# Express but only use it for saving files into the indicators folder. I will see if my high school enrolled son is eligible for the Dreamspark program.

In another thread I recommended that by right clicking within the Ninjatrader editor and adding a reference to System. Speech. dll. you give Ninjatrader text to speech capability that allows custom spoken alerts that are under programmatic control.

I'm also interested in making calls to a relational database from within Ninjascript. I know it can be done, but haven't done any work on that yet.

I have always just used the built in editor for Ninja. It can limit you a bit, but for what you need for 99% of projects, the built in editor is just fine.

I do most of my dev on Linux, with the vi (vim) editor (was a Unix developer in a previous life), then copy to windoze for compilation. I don't mind the NT editor for small changes, but ... well with grep, sed, awk etc, etc ...

I haven't tried this but there seems to be a way to enable JIT debugger for Visual Studio Express also.

NinjaTrader Support Forum - View Single Post - Workaround to Debug with Visual Studio Express Edition

Excellent responses. I knew about JetBrains, but not resharper. Also the post about dreamspark.com was a good one.

I went to dreamspark and found that they send an automated email to an edu account and you verify through the email. So I tried the alumni .edu account from my college and replied to the verify mail. It worked! I got a 12 month license to the dreamspark site which allows me to download
- Visual Studio 2010 Pro (no serial key reqd)
- MS Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (provides a generic key)
- SQL Server 2008 Developer
and much more.

Finally I've got a valid Visual Studio copy with the latest and greatest. I've been needing this for a long time.

If you have an alumni login to your school, try using this. Technically it is against the licensing, but it's all for the benefit of education. Lord knows we need as much help as we can get. I'm a student even though I may not be enrolled in a school at the moment. Always a student of technology.

The full set for C# - I seriously dispise the crap Ninja has produced as editor, and I would rather prefer they would fully support Visual Studio, with custom debugging plug ins etc.

* VIsual Studio 2010.
* TFS 2010 for my source code archives now. Prior versions were "no", but that new one is nice.
* TFS for work item tracking. Yes, I do that
* * Yes, again not really for strategies.
* TFS build vor CI work (agreeable, not ninja trader). I do some more complex stuff and want to know I do not break something - so I do continuous integration and gated check ins, with unit testing etc.
* * That part is currently too slow. Need a new server here with the new AMD 6 core - should triple the performance there Old dual core there - way too slow.
* SQL Server for data, obviously

The whole thing is running on one old server (the oldest here) so far - 8gb RAM, dual core Athlon, hyper-v, then virtual machines. I will soonish (next month) replace it with a 6 core AMD (with turbo boost - should give me about three times performance), 16gb RAM and then 4 discs in a RAID 10 so I finally have more space there (I am a little space limited). THat is the server side - the Continous integration cycle so far takes around 8 minutes and that is getting on my nerves

With the new memory I can also allocate a nice 4 core / 4gb virtual machine for backtesting

NetTecture, I sent you a PM but not sure you got it. Just briefly wanted to say to look here:

A new (open source?) trading platform Hey guys. Over the past year a good half dozen or more of you have told me that you are writing your own trading platform. Each of you have your own reasons for writing your own platform, but I think the one thing in common with all of you is that …

If you are interested reply on that thread.

Mike