It has been a little over a week now since I first installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. My first impressions are that this is a very solid program. Visual Studio 2008 was released in late November 2007 and by now most investment banks have migrated their development environments from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008.

The first thing you will notice after installing Visual Studio 2008 is how quickly it loads. Even on my old Pentium four system Visual Studio is still snappy and responsive. Visual Studio 2008 includes the .NET Framework 3.5 and in the professional version you have the ability to target different versions of the .NET  framework. This is a huge advantage over Visual Studio 2005 were you could only target one framework. The .NET Framework 3.5 brings with it many additional class libraries and features. Some highlights include:

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In our previous article we used a simple method for importing stock quote data into Excel. Today we will look at a robust automated method for querying more data sources then just Yahoo finance. The Stock Market Functions Add-in for Excel is a free tool developed by by Randy Harmelink. The stock market functions Add-In allows you to import data from sites like Yahoo, Business Week, Reuters, Google, Bloomberg, MSN and many more. In the latest release there are beta features for several technical analysis functions like

• Accumulation Distribution Line
• Average True Range
• Commodity Channel Index
• Simple Moving Average
• Moving Average Convergence Divergence
• Exponential Moving Average

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How would you like to work only four hours a week whilst maintaining or even increasing your income? I have to say I would and that is what lead me to purchasing this book. I had heard about this book but wasn’t convinced. So when I saw the book on special at my local supermarket I thought I would give it a read.

The book is written by Timothy Ferriss and he certainly practices what he preaches. He is another individual that is impossible to label. According to his biography he has been a cage fighter in Japan, holds a Guinness world record in tango, national Chinese kickboxing champion and actor in a TV series in China to name but a few of his achievements. Did I mention he is only 29 years old? You can see some of his media appearances and interviews on his website The Four Hour Work Week. The book is around 300 pages in length and is a straightforward read. From a trading perspective chapter six The Low-Information diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance is a must read.

Contents of the Book 

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Not all programers are created ==.

Source:http://xkcd.com/221/

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Early this week I watched an interesting article on ABC’s science show Catalyst. Catalyst looks at a broad range of Australian and International stories dealing with scientific breakthroughs and generally presents issues relating to science.

The story I found most interesting was called Lucky. The story focused on Professor Richard Wiseman research into luck. The basic findings were that lucky people were not born lucky they are merely unintentionally applying four basic principles. The four basic principles that have arisen in the research were:

Principle One: Maximise Chance Opportunities

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My copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition arrived today and I made sure I installed it promptly. The software comes packaged in the new style plastic boxes, much like Office and Vista. There are two DVD’s one contains Visual Studio 2008 and MSDN documentation and the second contains SQL Server 2005 Developers Edition. I have not had a chance to properly take it for a test run but after I do I will post a review. The install process was extremely simple, however I uninstalled my CTP releases first.

Install Process

The install process is really basic and can be summarised in just three steps as highlighted below.

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