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Stock Market Trading - Microsoft Visual C# .NET

The Client

Alliance Computer Systems Ltd. (ACS) is a solution and service provider for the gambling and gaming industry. They have been servicing the Asian market successfully for 10 years.

The Problem

ACS has their own development team experienced in the creation of several types of gaming applications. They needed to find a development partner that could effectively work with their team and that shared a common background in developing gaming solutions, data servers and interactive software that can be downloaded. Their new project involved creating several servers that would broadcast stock market data effectively to thousands of connected clients. They were seeking a solution that was flexible enough to work under different conditions in their data center, but also allow them to customize the business logic without much effort.

The Solution

ThinkingMedia was the perfect partner to develop the server software that could transmit real-time stock market data to thousands of connected clients. Our experience with multi-threaded socket programming allowed us to create a software architecture that utilized thread pools, custom protocols and a plug-in API for customizing business logic. We created this plug-in API so that ACS software developers could add their own business logic to the server.

ACS required strong stability of the server since it would process transactions for stock traders in real-time. Software quality was ensured by creating tools that allowed us to test the following:

  • the programming of automated units tests to ensure communication libraries, protocols and server software operated correctly
  • creation of software that simulated different client to server communication conditions
  • the programming of tools that reproduced different network conditions

Network traffic is important to any gaming application that runs over the Internet. ThinkingMedia developed a custom load balancing server that distributed bandwidth usage and server processing across an unlimited number of servers allowing ACS to scale their implementation to meet the needs of their customers.

The Technology

Platform: Windows Server

Technologies: Microsoft .NET Framework, C#, Sockets and multi-threaded programming.

Why ThinkingMedia?

ThinkingMedia has a history of developing server appliances and software. Our understanding of TCP/IP based socket communications proved to be invaluable on this project.