A note for the people who manage NinajTrader development

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Hi cunparis,

You should be able to search for words of 3 letters, which used to be 4 letters.

I will forward your request to disable the 20 seconds waiting time to perform a new search.

[cunparis]

I noticed that there have been no improvements to the search functionality of the forums. Today I received an error, it kept crashing. So I copy paste the text of the error into the search box and guess what? I can't search for the error because it contains words of 3 letters or less! So I remove them by hand, but guess what? I can't search again for 20 seconds. This is so frustrating, even more so because several people have complained about it yet the problem still exists. If such a simple issue can't be resolved, how am I going to have confidence that NT 7 will resolve my issues?

[spinalwiz]

Fantastic - great news!

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Forum is running on a new server and searches can be done using 3 character minimums now, where before it was 4.

[spinalwiz]

Hello Ray... Any update on the server upgrade...

I concur with the others regarding the character limit and 20 limit on searches. This has been a PITA for a long time.

Any news yet?

Just remembered this thread having tried to seach for info on ATM

[foxthorn]

Our plan is to migrate our support forum to an upgraded server next week sometime. The performance will be on par with user expectations, thanks for your patience and understanding.

Hello Ray... Any update on the server upgrade...

I concur with the others regarding the character limit and 20 limit on searches. This has been a PITA for a long time.

[Mindset]

Agree

then consider creating a "user support forum" here, for users to help other users on those topics, without any involvement from the support staff

Yes - leverage what is already there - it works fantastically well on TS support forum. A large no of people are very willing to spend time and effort to help others - usually those who have been helped themselves earlier.
Long term it is impossible for NT staff to handle all the queries. In IT terms it's not a scaleable model.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

I do appreciate your view but we will have to agree to disagree.

[anachronist]

There is no value in providing documented access to all of our class libraries if we can't provide support for it. It will just foster a poor user experience.

I disagree. You aren't giving credit to the user community here, who can and do provide support to other users. I know there are many, including myself, who would appreciate seeing more in-depth documentation accompanied by a disclaimer to use at our own risk, that no support should be expected. Some of us are talented enough to make use of such documentation, and help others make use of it too.

If you provide such documentation with appropriate disclaimers, then consider creating a "user support forum" here, for users to help other users on those topics, without any involvement from the support staff (except basic forum moderation operations such as banning users and deleting inappropriate posts). In such a forum, users would discuss those more esoteric features that the NinjaTrader staff cannot support. Questions about those features in other forums could be answered by directing the questioner to the user support forum.

-Alex

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Interesting comments, thanks for sharing...I thought I would throw mine in the ring.

In short, can we provide more in depth documentation, reference samples, online training webinars? Absolutely...And you will see this happen as we roll out NT7 in 2009.

- What we document is what we currently believe we can more than adequately provide support for. Since NinjaScript's release, we have grown the circle of what is supported with each release. There is no value in providing documented access to all of our class libraries if we can't provide support for it. It will just foster a poor user experience.

- We try to draw a very clear line on what is supported vs what is generic programming support or C#/.NET support. Sometimes we will step over this line on a subjective basis.

- We try to mask a lot of the granular C# by providing wizards...You can create a complete strategy using the wizard although there is some limitation of course since its point and click vs manual programming. However, the wizard is a great aid for people trying to understand how to program.

- The days of proprietary trading languages are a thing of the past, I can see many of our competitors adopt C# and I see this trend continue. With this comes a greater learning curve but also comes with greater flexibility and power and skill portability.

The direction we have chosen by using C# for sure will sour some who have a hard time converting but to me, the advantages to the user and to our business outweighs this greatly.

[anachronist]

NS want to sell me their software. They use a variant of C# programming language that makes their software very powerful and promising. It is one of their USP's.

NinjaTrader doesn't use a "variant" of C#, it uses C#. You don't even have to use NinjaTrader's editor interface to program it. You can use Microsoft Visual Studio if you want. It's just C#, with an application programming interface (API) that makes NinjaTrader what it is.

Other trading platforms use other languages; for example eSignal's platform uses Javascript. eSignal assumes you already know Javascript; all they need to provide is the API documentation.

I am pleased that you have learnt NS from the documentation, forums and online examples - currenlty that is how I am doing it.

But do you think that the way potential new users who have no programming experience "learn" NS now is ok?

Yes, I do. C# is an advanced programming language. Nobody without any programming experience is going to be able to jump into NinjaScript without first being intimately familiar with structured programming concepts as well as knowing a similar language like Java, C++, or PHP. That learning curve is the price one pays to have a powerful programming language on a trading platform.

It doesn't matter how much you dumb down a language, some newbies just don't learn it. Even EasyLanguage for TradeStation flummoxes non-programmers, and many go through their lives never learning how to write programs for it. I know, because I (and others) do consulting work for these folks.

There is no requirement for NinjaTrader to be perfect for everybody. Believe it or not, there is a market for powerful trading platforms that cater to the talents of experienced programmers.

That said, I do agree that NinjaTrader could offer more documentation, but not in the way you suggest. I wish they would publish advanced documentation on some of the underlying methods that users can override. An example is NinjaTrader's Plot() method. I can write my own override Plot() method now, having seen numerous examples, but nowhere have I seen anything actually documented. Someday, I'd like to see full documentation for writing custom override functions for that and other methods. I am sure there are un-documented properties that could be described, as well as C# properties that are tightly integrated into NT methods.

The NT documentation does a decent job documenting how to override OnMarketData(). But that's just the problem. The documentation isn't consistent. I'd like to see similar documentation on Plot(), GetMaxYValues(), and anything else of interest that I might be missing.

-Alex

[cunparis]

But do you think that the way potential new users who have no programming experience "learn" NS now is ok?

No room for improvement - its' perfect?

I'm an experienced Java developer (10+ years) so it was easy for me to pick up Ninjatrader. I spend 50% of my time figuring out how to use the Ninjatrader APIs, 40% on my algorithms, and 10% on .NET. For example I wanted to read in a file of CSV pivots and use those, I had to figure out how to do that in .NET. It was really easy.

for someone who doesn't know how to program, there is a bigger learning curve. But I do not feel that's Ninjtrader's responsability. Their responsability should stop with teaching how to use their APIs. I think if someone gets a "teach yourself C#" book they can probably figure it all out. If not they could try another platform such as tradestation that has books written about it. EasyLanguage is supposed to be very easy.

I've evaluated everything and so far Ninjatrader is the best for me because I can do anything I want (using C#). Plus it's close to Java. However, there are many areas left for improvement and that's how I started this thread. I think with some new features & improvements, Ninjatrader could easily blow the others away. A watchlist is one example. I am still using QuoteTracker for my day trading charts because of it's watchlist and the ability to just click on a symbol and have my chart pop up instantly.

I've been using Ninjatrader nonstop since I started this thread and I've learned even more about it, including the fact that it already has several features that I requested. I'm liking it more and more. It's the best backtesting platform for me. I just wish it was the best charting platform as well so I could do everything in one application.

[Mindset]

Interesting response

I feel I have to respond. It is not a question of responsibiltiy for learning. It isn't microsoft's responsibility nor is it Ninja Traders. BUT....

NS want to sell me their software. They use a variant of C# programming language that makes their software very powerful and promising. It is one of their USP's.

I am pleased that you have learnt NS from the documentation, forums and online examples - currenlty that is how I am doing it.

But do you think that the way potential new users who have no programming experience "learn" NS now is ok?

No room for improvement - its' perfect?

[anachronist]

I am happy to take the time to learn NS but how do you do that? A book is very slow and it doesn't relate to trading so you are left wondering - do I need to learn this chapter? I have no desire to learn programming per se.

It isn't the job of any of the NinjaTrader staff, or even this forum, to teach people how to program in C#. That's a Microsoft language, and it's Microsoft's responsibility to see that learning resources are available. See this site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w0x726c2.aspx

See in particular the sections on .NET framework class library and .NET framework programming.

However, I have rarely needed to refer to that site. I learned NinjaScript entirely from the online documentation, this forum, practice, and more practice, and especially from looking at examples in the file sharing area.

-Alex

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Our plan is to migrate our support forum to an upgraded server next week sometime. The performance will be on par with user expectations, thanks for your patience and understanding.