When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Questions about MultiCharts .NET and user contributed studies.
bluelou
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When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby bluelou » 28 Feb 2013

I purchased MC.net 2 months ago and was told by MC tech support at the time of purchase that enhanced documentation w/examples would be forthcoming in about 1 month. It's 2 months later and I see the wiki for the regular MultiCharts but I still don't see anything for MC.net other than the API docs.

I'm currently a NT user and I'm hoping to switch to MC.net soon given that I bought a license but I really don't have time to decipher the API docs or look through sample strategy code that doesn't really fit my specific requirements for existing NT strategies. When will a wiki for MC.net or similar documentation be released?

Also, I'm a bit concerned that better docs aren't already available. Don't you guys need to sell licenses in order to justify support for the product? Why put up this unnecessary barrier to entry?

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Henry MultiСharts
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby Henry MultiСharts » 01 Mar 2013

Hello bluelou,

Our Wiki section provides detailed up-to-date information about current MultiCharts functionality. You can reference this information as the platform help guide when using both products MultiCharts and MultiCharts .NET as they have the same functionality but are using different programming languages.

As for the .Net programming guide - MultiCharts .Net is oriented to experienced programmers. In case you have any questions regarding C# coding we recommend referencing MSDN for information. Interfaces and classes available in MultiCharts .Net are described in MC .Net help file. You can also find the code examples in the source code of the prebuilt MultiCharts studies.

We understand the importance of documentation and we are already working hard on the updated MultiCharts .NET guide that will contain important and useful information not only for beginners but for experienced MC .Net users as well.

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby bluelou » 01 Mar 2013

Henry,
I take issue with your efforts so far. You say MC is "working hard" on the guide. How many months does it take to write the guide? Also, referring me to MSDN or the existing MC.net API documentation is not sufficient.

I'm not asking for a "how-to" program guide. But, for instance, if there's an MC.net interface then document what the interface does and how to helps me use MC.net more effectively. If there's a method, then explain what the method does, what the overloads are, and throw in a few lines of examples.

If it's not clear then here's an example of documentation that's typical for R, the open-source statistical programming language. I can use this one doc, get an idea of what the package (library) does, what the functions are, and examples of how to use them. In effect, I can rapidly develop an application w/this doc. Isn't that what you guys are trying to do, too?

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ ... rument.pdf

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby JoshM » 03 Mar 2013

We understand the importance of documentation and we are already working hard on the updated MultiCharts .NET guide that will contain important and useful information not only for beginners but for experienced MC .Net users as well.
Dear MultiCharts LLC management,

I do not doubt that MultiCharts Support is working on this, but I agree with Bluelou's observations that this is taking quite some time. Especially since this, given the target customers of MC .NET, doesn't have to be a full-blown "How to.." guide but 'just' some more documentation than the current documentation.

Of course, you guys are already very busy with a lot of other things, but why doesn't MC management hire a freelance documentation writer? Expanding the MC .NET documentation will probably take not more than two weeks, and if this leads to higher sales, this investment is recouped quickly. And this will be a good service to those loyal MultiCharts customers who have bought MultiCharts .NET licenses and who are probably your biggest source of positive word-of-mouth (also see below). Plus that, once you have a more expanded documentation, it's much easier to keep this up-to-date.

Word-of-mouth
When I asked a MultiCharts Support employee a month or two ago what we (MultiCharts .NET users) could do to give this new MultiCharts product more traction, he suggested positive and honest word-of-mouth through Twitter and forums. And while I think MultiCharts is a great product, without a good documentation MC .NET is not something that can be advised to people who are looking for a C# trading platform. What should I tell these people, something like the following?
MultiCharts is a great product, with a lot of supported brokers and data feeds, a quick release cycle, splendid support and the possibility make feature request and vote for these. I myself use MultiCharts .NET since August last year when it was released, but their technical documentation is still a pain to read and still don't feel very competent in programming for it with a lot of time spend Googling or trying a trail-and-error approach.
If a lot of your sales come from word-of-mouth, you can see how difficult it can be suggest MultiCharts .NET to other people, unless they are experienced C# programmers either by formal education or multiple years of autodidact experience.

To highlight this further with a small anecdote, I told a trading friend of mine (quite competent in programming, but not in C#) about MultiCharts .NET, and he was initially quite enthusiastic about the possibilities and features of MultiCharts .NET. However, after looking at the .chm file, he could only remark that "this doesn't look like something you call 'documentation'." And this is only one customer that I'm aware off, but how many other people were put off by the .chm "documentation"?

Actually, there are already negative comments about the lacking documentation of MC .NET on forums like BigMikeTrading. It pains me to see that such a great product fails to do something as basic as providing a good documentation.

MultiCharts .NET and its target customers
And, as Blueluo already mentioned, your biggest competitor NT has a good documentation. So people who are interested in a C# trading platform, are currently much better off learning this on NT, and at a later point, once they are competent enough to read technical C# documentation, to switch to MC .NET. But at that point, these people have already invested a lot of time, energy, and possible money, in NT, so the incentive is much lower to switch.

Something that is in my opinion quite a mistake in positioning MultiCharts .NET is the focus on "experienced C# programmers" as its target customers. I think that the majority of the experienced C# programmers already has had, at some earlier point in their 'journey', already been exposed to NT or any other competing C# trading platform. To put it differently, how many experienced C# programmers by trade use MultiCharts .NET? The group of people who want to use a C# trading platform but aren't fully educated and experienced in C#/.NET programming is much and much larger.

In other words, your target customers consist primarily out of people who have already used competing C# trading platforms but for some reason didn't like these. In my opinion, that's a much smaller potential client base than if you define target customers as "people looking to use the programming language C#/.NET for algorithmic and/or discretionary trading".

MultiCharts .NET and its competition
Worse yet, even a MultiCharts "fan" like me must admit that the upcoming NT 8 looks very promising. Given the marketing and word-of-mouth power that NT already has (and how much forums like BigMikeTrading advertise NT), it's hard to see how MultiCharts .NET can become a successful product without a good documentation that will make the learning curve significantly smaller.

And then I'm not even mentioning other competing products like IQBroker (retail version release later this year) which are not technologically better than MultiCharts .NET, but do provide less technical documentation.

And yes, technologically speaking MultiCharts is still better than the other popular trading platform, but I think it's an error to assume that the technology better product will also come out on top regardless other factors (such as a good documentation).


I want to emphasize that this is not a critique on MultiCharts Support employees or on the MultiCharts product itself. My only issue is with the MC .NET documentation. And this probably wouldn't have required such a long reply :), but I'm hoping that my point has been made clear now.


Thank you for giving me the possibility to express my concerns regarding the MultiCharts .NET documentation,

My best regards,
Josh

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Dave Masalov
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby Dave Masalov » 06 Mar 2013

Hello Josh,

Thank you for feedback. We undrestand your point and we really appreciate your concern. MC .NET help is a high priority task for us and we are putting a lot of ressources in creating a comprehensive programming guide which will then be added to MC Wiki.

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby bluelou » 06 Mar 2013

Dave,
When do you expect to have the guide? Even a rough estimate will do.

I think Josh said more of what I wanted to say, just more eloquently. For the record, I wouldn't have bot MC.net had I not had some very strong personal recommendations to go with MultiCharts over the other trading platform. But, the recommendations were for standard MC, not MC.net given that it's a fairly new product.

~Lou

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Dave Masalov
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby Dave Masalov » 07 Mar 2013

Lou,

A rough estimate would be 3-4 weeks. Again, MC .NET user manual is a high priority task for us and we will do our best to release it as quickly as possible.

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby balance » 12 Mar 2013

I visited this forum and MC site every two *months* just to see how're things.
It's great to have new releases and +100 new features and cumulative delta what ever.
For my own project, it's purely pattern recognition and involve not a single 'indicator'.
Strategy aside, auto trading by itself is a very very complex project, not to mention we're talking about our own money at stake.

The other trading platform programming manual is just barely adequate. MC .net's documentation however is at 'pre-school' level. A dump of class/method's header is what you call manual??

I hate to say but the fact is until there is a decent programmer's manual with sample codes, this will just be experimental...

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Dave Masalov
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby Dave Masalov » 14 Mar 2013

Dear Users,

We understand the importance of .NET documentation and we are working on it at the moment. Meanwhile, we want to hear some feedback from you to make sure that new manual meets your expectations.

Please post the questions/topics that you want to be answered/covered in full details in the new manual.

Also, do you want us to focus more on case scenarios and complex script examples or pay more attention to detailed explanation of every method and class?

bluelou
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby bluelou » 14 Mar 2013

Dave,
Following along in the style of the attachment I posted earlier
(http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ ... rument.pdf)

I'd expect to see documentation for every available method, interface, and event handler. It would be helpful to see some documentation for relevant code that is not exposed to the user.

Based upon the outline used in the pdf doc above, for each method the docs might cover the topics as follows: Description, Usage, Arguments, Details, Value, Examples, See Also

Copious examples and case studies for potentially complex issues, like order handling, can only help to demystify the development process.

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby JoshM » 14 Mar 2013

Also, do you want us to focus more on case scenarios and complex script examples or pay more attention to detailed explanation of every method and class?
Thanks for being open to feedback regarding an expanded manual. However, I don’t think it’s a case of more examples or more detailed explanation since in my view both are needed. For example, the PowerLanguage.TradeManager namespace is fully described in the .chm file, but for example the IBaseFilterNotify is said to be “a base filter 'notify' interface”. This sounds obvious to experienced C# programmers, but these 5 words of explaining what IBaseFilterNotify does are far from sufficient. So I’ll have to Google that, but the results for “c# ibasefilter notify” are not at all helpful.

The same goes for the Order Structure member of the PowerLanguage.TradeManager namespace, which is said to be “the structure that defines order info”. Again, this may sounds obvious to other people, but I don’t see an example of how to use the public struct Order and what it does.

Another example, the description for the CStudyAbstract class reads “Base class for studies”, and the description for the CStudyControl class reads “Base class for studies”. Obviously, the CStudy* name already implies they are related, but with the exact same description of just four words and no examples, I have to compare their members to see whether I need to use CStudyAbstract or CStudyControl. Since their members are also briefly described without examples, I guess I'll have to try them both.

Why not expand the .chm file like the MultiCharts wiki is organized, so something like:
CStudyAbstract
*technical description for the pro’s*

*simple description which highlights what CStudyAbstract is used for*

Example
*code example so that we know how to instantiate the CStudyAbstract class (for example, should we also use the Create and Destroy methods?)*

Notes
*Some comments, for example: “Also see CStudyControl for .... “.
The way the .chm help file is structured is quite counterintuitive compared with the regular MultiCharts manual and the other trading platform manual (who both list by topic, not alphabetically by class structure). This makes it painful to find something and it also requires a puzzle approach. So perhaps that can also be looked into.

Edit:
For example, this clearly explains how a buy market order is generated:

Image

But in the .chm file there is no clearness, and searching for "enter long" or "buy" gives no helpful results. From code examples I know the OrderCreator is called in the Create methods, so I guess this .chm page "explains" it:

Image
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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby glam_100 » 27 Mar 2013

I think a documentation that helps EasyLanguage user to migrate from EL to the new programming model/platform will be of great help.

For example, the whole EL programming model revolves around bars on a chart and every indicators/signal operates on a bar by bar basis. How MC.Net would change that model should be explained from the point of view of a EL programmer.

I think to successfully help the most users to use MC.Net the documentation has to explain everything from a EL point of view. Everything that we can do in EL should be explained with it's .Net equivalent. The most important explanation needed is the difference in the EL and MC.Net programming model.

Since EL is a 4GL there are many domain specific assumptions already built into the language. TSSupport needs to point out how all those domain specific assumptions are now being handled now .Net. For example in EL:

avg = average(close);

close is automatically a numerical series of closes... how MC.Net is going to handle that built-in numerical series has to be explained ...etc.

Instead of pointing users to look at .Net programming references or worse trying to create a .Net programming manual, it maybe easier to forget the language or .Net part and instead focus on the functional part - How we do things we used to be able to do with EL. We don't need to learn the whole .Net programming thing. Just tells us the relevant parts and explain everything in terms of how to achieve it's EL equivalent would be a great start.

Documentation and support is very very important. The success of MC today is party (if not heavily) owed to the popularity of EasyLanguage which has been heavily supported by TS with many years of great documentations, programming examples, easy language experts and support staffs as well as a very helpful community. It's a whole Eco system to get it to what it is today. With MC.Net TSS has to do all this from scratch there is no more leverage on other people's shoulder.

TSS has to realize the gravity of this. If you expect people to learn and use a much more complicated programming language and programming model such as MC.Net with just a help file that lists all the functions it just ain't gonna happen. Expect to do what TS has done for years to get Easylanguage take off - only with much bigger challenge because Easylanguage by itself is a much simpler language and programming model.

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Re: When will we see better documentation for MC.net?

Postby Dave Masalov » 18 Apr 2013

Dear Users,

MultiCharts .NET Programming Guide has been released. Please see the following post: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=15742


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