A note for the people who manage NinajTrader development

[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]

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]

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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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]

Fantastic - great news!

[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?

[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]

An update from the original poster

I was searching for a topic and this thread came up in the list, so I read it again. It's been a few months since I wrote it. While I still feel that what I wrote about in the original post is still valid, it's obvious that I was really frustrated when I wrote it!

Since then, I've been using Ninjatrader daily testing out various trading strategies. I've gotten to know it very well. My biggest problem now? Crashing & the lack of multi-core support. For some reason Ninjatrader crashes often. If I notice a pattern I'll post the trace.

The lack of multi-core support is killing me. I have a quad core and when I run the optimizer, it can take 10-20 minutes and I can barely (painfully) modify my strategy for the next run. I understand this is coming in NT7 so I'm not going to complain other than say I can't wait for NT7.

Finally, I purchased a license a few weeks ago. After evaluating a few other products I decided that even with its quirks I liked Ninjatrader the best. What I like the best is that it uses C# and I can use all the object oriented programming techniques that I love. I have coded up a multi-instrument multi-timeframe strategy with position sizing. I guess it ends up being a mini-trading system coded in a trading system. It has been a lot of fun, a lot more fun than my real job where we do Java development to measure TV audiences.

Anyway, I just wanted to update the thread to end it on a positive note. And to say thanks to all the Ninjatrader support staff whose very quick responses have allowed me to work very efficiently. Thanks! And I can't wait for the NT7 beta!

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Thanks forthe note, for sure if you can get a reproducible scenario to your crashes that can help us identify the problem. Thanks for your purchase! NT7 will improve areas in memory and utilization of multiple-cores.

[cunparis]

Just wanted to add that the crashing happens when running the optimizer. Sometimes I see it using 1 gig of memory (I have 4 total). Sometimes exiting and restarting seems to help with the memory usage and speed. But every once in a while it'll hang on the "loading data" (could be IQFeed's fault but it sure would be nice if we could cancel it with NT instead of waiting) and if I try to stop or exit it'll crash. But at least the crashes are limited to during development.

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Since I just came across your last post ... it's a common misperception that windows would use whatever physical RAM would be available. For any 32-bit process windows only would use max up to ~1.6 GB RAM.

However, NT7 will come with some improvements regarding memory consumption.

[r2kTrader]

Update?

I found myself posting another messaging regarding this issue. When I ran into it again, I was surprised it still existed.

Hi r2kTrader,

As stated in the response I have sent you, we are aware of the limitations of our Support Forum and currently are looking into options on how they can be overcome.

We will let you know when this will be changed.