Zignals and IP Ventures Celebrate Their Success

Zignals goes live with the commercial marketplace for trading strategies - an "eBay of Finance"

Zignals is celebrating its 2-year anniversary launch with the release of its keystone service, the commercial MarketPlace for trading strategies. The MarketPlace is at the core of the Zignals world, offering members the opportunity to earn money in a 50:50 revenue share with Zignals.

Zignals is unique amongst online financial service providers by offering a total solution for global investors. From the launch of charts and alerts in 2008, members now have available to them a portfolio manager, stock screener, trading strategy builder and the newly minted MarketPlace with new services like the Trade Timer due for release soon.

All trading strategies published by Zignals members are available for purchase in the MarketPlace. As a hook to populate the MarketPlace, all Publishers of trading strategies get their strategy trading signals for free. To help publicise individual strategies, each member's home page is not just a source of information on their alerts, strategies and portfolios - but is also a marketing page to allow members share their strategies with prospective subscribers.

Pat Brazel, CEO of Zignals, “If you’re a super-smart financial whiz with time on your hands to build strategies for trading stocks, we act as your agent, and for investors disappointed with other sources of trading advice, we offer a marketplace where the best trading strategies can be found.”

One of the challenges facing Zignals is bringing data-heavy services frequently found only at institutional investment houses to the desktop of retail investors in a fast, responsive manner. Microsoft's IP Ventures Program, celebrating its 5-year anniversary, was able to help.

“Most people are stunned at how fast our performance is when you consider everything that it’s doing,” Brazel says. “And that’s in no small measure due to the Microsoft technologies we used."

In addition, Zignals user interface is built on Microsoft's web-based, Silverlight.

"Silverlight addresses the needs of Web-based traders better than any other technology. Not only does it look great, but the practical advantages of a zero-footprint, no-install implementation are immense."

Zignals isn't resting on its laurels. A new free-in-beta premium service, Trade Timer, is set for release with a feature set unique to any financial application. Zignals members will be able to test trade triggers across a range of stocks for a selected risk management strategy.

With 20,000 members and growing, Zignals offers opportunity and support for investors and traders across the globe to prosper - from building and selling trading strategies, tracking portfolios, charting stocks, to market alerts and active stock scans. Zignals has it all.
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The cost of a character...

Having received some feedback from one of our members that our new version of our Stock Charts had a problem of sliding menus sticking, and given the absence of the lead Silverlight developer, it fell to me to investigate and solve this strange problem.

A real head-scratcher this one since this worked fine on our development machines, and our test and staging environment (the majority of bugs are picked off from our test servers, a few unusual ones may creep through to the staging servers, before giving the all-clear to be released live!). This made it a tough problem to diagnose (since you can’t debug something that is essentially “working” on your development pc!). What made it even more difficult is that the lead Silverlight developer on the charting project is on holidays (always the time when something goes wrong!). Even more interesting about the problem was that in both “fullscreen” Silverlight mode and when the “Annotations” panel was pinned, the slider sticking problem simply went away! Two modes completely unrelated to the menus appeared to “fix” the problem!

To make a long story (in my case a two day trawl through thousands of lines of code) short, it turned out that during an asynchronous, looping call to an animation (the “Slide” in question) the code was stepping through the animation at intervals of 29px and was trying to tell the main class that the animation was over when the animation reached or exceeded the maximum height of the panel. In our case, with the new version of the Charts, the maximum height happened to by 377px. Now purely coincidentally, 29 happens to divide into 377 exactly 13 times, so when the line of code read something like “if x > y, finish animation” then because 377 is not greater than 377 it kept going... going nowhere! So a simple addition of an “=” character to read “while x >= y, finish animation” solved the problem.

Such a simple solution, but unfortunately to a problem buried deep in code that would work perfectly on a developer’s pc and only go wrong when the height of the Silverlight application was constrained to a multiple of 29, making it a needle in a haystack to find.

Scott Tattersall, Chief Technology Officer, Zignals.com the free stock alerts, market alerts, and stock charts website
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Trouble with Silverlight/WCF deployment

We’ve been having a lot of trouble moving Silverlight projects from development machines to production servers recently. This is especially true of new Silverlight beta 2 projects using WCF as the data communication layer. The problem seems to be when we try and move from a VS2008 development environment (where the WCF service runs by default off the in-built VS web server) to an IIS based production server. We don’t want to be running a temporary web server on a production environment (indeed we normally wouldn’t even have one as the development environment would not be installed) and we can’t link the Silverlight project to the “localhost” implementation of the WCF service.

So we have to change the addressing of the Silverlight web service from localhost to zignals.com and we have to run the web service from the IIS rather than the temporary web server it would normally run from when you run the project on the development machine. These changes have led to us seeing a lot of errors involving:
1) Endpoints mismatches
2) Cross domain security
3) IIS configuration issues
4) References not updating

We haven’t solved all the above consistently, but through a lot of trial and error we have got our projects deployed online. The things to look out for:
1) Register .xap files as MIME types in IIS
2) Modify the projects to all use the IIS server on the developer machines instead of the default web server
3) Put the WCF service on the deployment server, and then modify the web reference in Silverlight to point to the deployment server instead of localhost, then add the Silverlight project to the deployment server
4) Modify the hosts file on the deployment server to point your domain name to 127.0.0.1 so you can use the project on the server as well as remotely
5) Use clientaccesspolicy.xml to avoid cross domain issues
6) When re-referencing to a new web service, you should do a search through all files in the project for the original reference (e.g. “localhost”). We had a problem where some .config files didn’t auto-update and we had to manually change this reference.

Needless to say, we aren’t the only ones facing deployment problems with 2.0 beta, so here are some links to others solutions:
http://weblogs.asp.net/tolgakoseoglu/archive/2008/03/18/silverlight-2-0-and-wcf.aspx
http://silverlight.net/forums/p/10852/34477.aspx
http://archdipesh.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-do-i-deployhost-wcf-service-on.html

Scott Tattersall is lead developer of stock alerts, stock charts, and market sentiment for Zignals
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