McGregor BFA

For us, time is money. We have tight deadlines and large project scopes. We have saved on average 1 hour of work per day using CodeRush with Refactor! Pro.

Fin24.Markets – a Round-the-Сlock Provision

Fin24.Markets provides a platform to provide real time trade data from various stock exchanges to subscribed clients. This solution provides the infrastructure and integration required to receive data from the stock exchanges in raw format, transform these messages into domain specific concepts and route these messages in various formats, including binary, xml, REST, SOAP and FIX, to subscribed clients. Clients are able to subscribe to a specific instrument on a given stock exchange, specify rules, query history on instruments, and can even implement trades from their various trading platforms. We also provide integration support into the various trading platforms.

Choosing DevExpress

After hearing very good reviews from the guys at DotNetRocks and their DNRTV shows we decided to try out DevExpress. We have come to respect their guidance and opinions and this recommendation was no exception.

We are currently using CodeRush and Refactor! Pro in our solution. We follow a TDD approach when developing software and it was necessary to use a tool that could help us quickly convert test code into our domain model. This has helped us increase our number of tests in the same given time period and thus increase our test coverage and overall quality of our product.

We have a team of 4-5 developers working on this solution. We are very pattern-centric when dealing with our development and solution design. Even though we have a good sense of programming and best practices, each person in our team has their own style of coding. CodeRush has helped ease this burden by generating code in best practice format and also helped us enforce strict naming conventions and standards.

Time-Critical Implementation

During our current project cycle, we were under pressure to implement a working prototype of our Fin24.Markets project within a very short period of time. After the initial solution and domain design, we were able, using CodeRush, to implement a fully-functioning domain model using an Event Sourcing pattern (from Martin Fowler), which included full test coverage using TDD, in 12 hours. By doing this we acquired the contract for the integration into a well known trading platform for a specific stock exchange in South Africa.

Benefits from Using DevExpress Tools

For us, time is money. We have tight deadlines and large project scopes. We have saved on average 1 hour of work per day using Refactor! and CodeRush. This gives us an average of 12.5% increase in productivity and thus product delivery is increased. I am sure as we continue to use the products we will be able to increase our productivity even more.

CodeRush has provided us with a tool to easily generate code from tests which is bug free. It has also enforced best practices and good naming conventions. It has also a nice panel which you can dock on the left hand side of your screen which indicates any number of shortcuts at any given time. This has drastically decreased our learning curve and thus enabled us to reap the benefits sooner.

Refactor! Pro has also shown us on numerous occasions a variety of coding concerns:

• Dead code that we could clean up
• Possible enhancements to code which could use the latest features of the .NET Framework
• Simplify expressions

CodeRush also provides numerous Demos, QuickStarts and Tools that you can use to quickly get up and running in a project.

We have a new project coming up to enhance and restructure Fin24.com and we will be using the Silverlight tools for some parts of this product. This will greatly save us time because Silverlight, out of the box, does not provide us with very many tools. We would have to build common components from the ground up. DevExpress provides a neat solution to this problem. They include numerous components we can use and well as different ways to style them and layout options. This is a great advantage to us because any code that we don't have to write is less code to test and maintain.

In Conclusion

I have tried other similar products in the market, but I would recommend this product to my friends and colleagues. What Refactor! Pro provides is additional refactoring support for C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, and XML and DXperience comes with pre-packaged and customizable components that you can use in WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, AJAX and Windows Forms controls. If you are looking to get value for your money, then you should use this product.

Lee Meyeridricks
Software Developer