Financial Services Developer Awards
Joe Cleaver, Platform Strategy Advisor & Joe Rubino, Architect Evangelist – Microsoft Corporation
Innovation and development excellence in Financial Services is nothing new. One of the major challenges is adopting the latest technology, and developing and deploying a solution on it that meets or, more importantly, exceeds the business need that it was to originally address. Windows in Financial Services magazine, in conjunction with Microsoft, is proud to honor five Financial Services software solutions developed by customers and partners using Microsoft technology. For their outstanding efforts, they were presented a Windows in Financial Services Developer Award during the 5th Annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference which was held on April 25 - 26 in New York City. The solutions, customers, and partners can be found below. For more detailed descriptions and to see the winners, please see the spring 2007 and summer 2007 editions of Windows in Financial Services. Congratulations to our winners!

What Is ASP.NET AJAX?
ASP.NET AJAX provides a thin client approach to building rich interactive Web sites that go beyond the traditional boxy interfaces of static Web pages to give you rich client side behavior that you generally expect from a desktop application. An AJAX-enabled site looks more appealing and really envelops your user. Studies indicate that AJAX-enabled sites have a higher degree of stickiness (meaning the time that a user spends on the pages).

AJAX isn't a new technology, and its components have been used by Microsoft for more than 10 years. You've probably seen the enhanced browser experience in action if you've worked with Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access. In ASP.NET 2.0, we have added support for AJAX style functionality, making it easy to write applications and use these client-side controls in an object-oriented fashion.

Keep in mind -- you don't have to use ASP.NET to build AJAX-enabled applications. You certainly can use the Microsoft AJAX Library on its own without using ASP.NET. The Microsoft AJAX library contains all the JavaScript client side libraries that are included in the full ASP.NET AJAX installation. For more information or to install downloads go to http://ajax.asp.net/

Released! Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista
Visual Studio 2005 is one of the most significant developer tools releases since the introduction of Visual Studio nearly a decade ago. It offers all types of developers a wider spectrum of development possibilities and a greatly advanced design experience. By expanding the Visual Studio product line to include the Visual Studio Team System and the Visual Studio Express Editions, Visual Studio 2005 delivers a compelling toolset for everyone, from hobbyists to enterprise developer teams.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 continues Microsoft's investment in market leading development tools. Service Pack 1 (SP1) addresses issues that were found through a combination of customers and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. The issues addressed range in severity from places where the syntax coloring was incorrect to customer-reported crashes in various scenarios. In some areas, more than 50 percent of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product Feedback Center and Microsoft Connect. Overall, Service Pack 1 offers customers improvements in responsiveness, stability, and performance for Visual Studio 2005. It also addresses areas of Visual Studio impacted by Windows Vista enhancements.

Windows Vista Developer Center

Microsoft Office System 2007

Unwrapped for Financial Services III
Download this webcast series which covered the latest technologies from Microsoft to enable your solutions for Capital Markets, Banking and Insurance firms. All sessions are available for download here.

Q&A: Visual Studio 2005 Refresh Helps Developers Take Full Advantage of Windows Vista
“Soma” Somasegar, chief of Microsoft's Developer Division, discusses opportunities and benefits that customers and partners can experience by harnessing the power of Windows Vista to build secure, reliable and connected applications.

Microsoft Design Resources
Good user experience is now common in the consumer space, and it's the next domain of differentiation in the enterprise.

Building Interoperable Insurance Systems with .NET 3.0 Technologies
Through maturity of many enterprises, we live in a world where there is more than one stack of technology. As a result, there has been more than a few Band Aids applied to the various technologies. This whitepaper series is to provide guidance around integration challenges.

Financial Services OBA
This white paper will walk you through a loan-origination scenario. This scenario is tailored for the banking industry. It will provide guidance for making architecture decisions around real-world business and technology issues that plague the banking industry.

View content from the 4th Annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference
Microsoft's 4th annual Financial Services Developer Conference took place April 24-25, 2006 at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York. Presentations from the event can be viewed here.

Webcast: Microsoft Real-Time Collaboration: Solutions for Financial Services
View the on-demand version of the Webcast on Microsoft Real-Time Collaboration solutions and how they can help Financial Services firms become more agile and responsive while engaging in more cost-effective communications with enhanced security features.

ASP.NET AJAX version 1.0 Released
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers.

With ASP.NET AJAX, you can:

• Create next-generation interfaces with reusable AJAX components.
• Enhance existing Web pages using powerful AJAX controls with support for all modern browsers.
• Continue using Visual Studio 2005 to take your ASP.NET 2.0 sites to the next level.
• Access remote services and data directly from the browser without writing a ton of complicated script.
• Enjoy the benefits of a free framework with 24x7 technical support provided by Microsoft.

EntLib 3.0 Jan2007 CTP Beta Released
January 2007 CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0. Includes near-complete implementation of the Validation Application Block, Application Block Software Factory, Visual Studio-integrated config tool, Logging and DAAB enhancements and more.

Microsoft Expression Web Now Shipping
Reduce complexity and ease data integration by using powerful design tools and task panes to quickly incorporate XML data. Seamlessly integrate Web design and development teams with Expression Web and Visual Studio's superior support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML.

Total Training for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Are you looking to quickly ramp up on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0? Total Training has just released a 7.5 hour self study video series, Total Training for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 – Productivity with .NET Framework 2.0, presented by Asli Bilgin from Microsoft’s Industry Platform Team. You can sample a free except from the Web site.

Also, be sure to register for the Financial Services Developer Conference, where all attendees will receive a DVD containing 2 hours of FREE training videos, as well as a discount purchase coupon on the entire Total Training for Visual Studio 2005 series. The series contains self-guided lessons, complete with work-along project files that will help you increase your knowledge and understanding of Visual Studio.

Whether you are looking to stay competitive or just keep up to date on the latest Microsoft technology, this series is your ticket to success. Get warmed up with some basics on debugging - setting breakpoints with a desktop application and working with Web-based applications. Next it's time to understand how to make the most of smart client applications and how to work with code access security. Wrap up your knowledge base by exploring topics on working with web services, exception handling, and the Compact Framework.

Building Connected Systems in Financial Services
Microsoft offers a comprehensive application platform that enables financial services businesses to deliver faster results, make better decisions, and run their critical systems. These products, services, and best practices are tightly integrated, eliminating the need to cobble together a solution and freeing the organization to focus on their business problems. The integrated Microsoft application platform provides a cohesive, intuitive platform capable of powering the modern business.

Introducing Banking Integration Factory
Microsoft introduces the first industry software factory called the Banking Integration Factory. The Banking Integration Factory combines various software factories and builds on them to provide solutions for integration at the services level and also introduces the Microsoft vision for composite banking applications. Download the whitepaper to read more about this exciting initiative.

Deploy Distributed Business Processes with Windows Workflow and Web Services
Due to the distributed nature of a business process—coordinating information coming from multiple sources across an organization—it makes sense for a workflow to be deployed as a distributed application. To support this functionality, the Windows® Workflow Foundation team chose Web services and IIS as the host platform for executing distributed workflow applications.

Introducing a New and Powerful UI Builder
The primary goal of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is to help developers create attractive and effective user interfaces. Learn how the WPF unified platform helps make designers active participants in creating user interfaces, and provides a common programming model for standalone and browser applications.

White Paper — Windows Mobile in Financial Services
Financial services firms rely upon the latest market, product, customer, and regulatory information to gain an advantage in this highly competitive industry. See how Windows Mobile is helping Financial Services firms around the world address these unique challenges.

Just Released: Smart Client Software Factory
With the Smart Client Software Factory, architects and developers can quickly incorporate many of the proven practices and patterns of building composite smart client applications. These practices and patterns have been identified during the development of many smart client applications and their components. This new guide uses the Global Bank as the Smart Client Baseline example.

Now Available: The New Atlas Control Toolkit
The Atlas Control Toolkit is a set of controls and extenders that use Atlas technologies to enable developers to easily improve the client experience on their Web sites. The toolkit includes components that enable developers to enrich their Web applications and examples for those wishing to write client-side code, and highlights the work of some of best script developers. Questions about the toolkit can be asked at the ASP.NET Forums.

Visual Studio Extensibility Center
The Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Center is the place to share, buy, create, and sell add-ins and packages. Sync your IDE with the way you think and work. Add functionality like multilevel undo-redo power. Collaborate using a project dashboard. Or just rearrange the interface to suit your preferences. Customizing your work environment can save you time — time that can be better spent solving creative challenges.

Announcing Identity and Access Management Resources for Developers
Identity and access management has become more complex, as digital identities take on an increasingly important role in specifying how users interact with computer networks and line-of-business applications. Therefore, application developers must have a consistent and effective strategy for building software that leverages the identity rich capabilities of the Windows platform.

Updated DevCon 2006 Summary and Presentations – including Keynote videos
The 2006 Financial Services Developers conference was a huge success. Over 400 folks attended the event that focused on nextgen tools and practical implementation examples for the Financial Services Platform of the future. Thank you to all that attended. For access to presentations from the event please click here.

Spreadsheet Compliance with Excel 2007
Organizations today are under considerable regulatory pressure to ensure that financial reporting processes are both transparent and well-documented. Three visible examples of such legislation are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (United States, 2002), the Data Protection Act (European Union, 1998), and the Basel Capital Accord (Basel II, 2006), which together impact most publicly-traded companies around the world. However, corporate finance is just one area affected by compliance legislation; separate industry and local regulations also exist. An organization must take into account all applicable policies and requirements when developing a regulatory compliance framework. The strategies and technology described in this paper can help organizations achieve success in establishing spreadsheet control policies that meet both regulatory requirements and business needs.

Branch Offices: A Focus on Server Infrastructure
Discover ways to reduce management and wide-area networking costs through Microsoft's branch office approach—highlighted by the Branch Office Infrastructure Solution.

Building Connected Systems in Financial Services – The .NET Framework and the Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform (PDF)
Microsoft’s connected systems strategy centers on the .NET Framework development technologies as the common development framework spanning clients and servers, with a focus on Web services and industry standards such as SOAP and Extensible Markup Language (XML) for interoperability with components and services provided by other vendors. Download your copy.

Creating a Systemized Approach to Regulatory Compliance
The complex universe of controls is often referred to with the general term regulatory compliance. For global companies that conduct business in multiple jurisdictions, their compliance obligations quickly become incredibly complex, because they must address compliance for all of the countries in which they do business. Addressing each action by creating an individual compliance initiative can place a burden on a business and its IT organization. Download a copy of the Regulatory Compliance white paper.

The second annual .NET Unwrapped webcast week for Financial Services has recently completed and is now available for viewing
Tune in to .NET Unwrapped, the webcast series focused on real-world developer solutions for the financial services industry. Hear from the Microsoft financial services team as well as experts who have deployed technologies and systems at some of the largest financial institutions.

Creating Business Value for Financial Services through Better Collaboration
Financial services organizations are challenged to deliver greater market differentiation and operational excellence to compete in today’s global marketplace. Microsoft®ΔFinancial Services offers rich, comprehensive collaboration technology to empower information workers to work more productively, enabling banks, insurance companies, and capital markets to realize tangible business benefits.

The Business Value of Upgrading to SQLServer 2005
Business decision makers deploying Microsoft® SQL Server technologies have adopted SQL Server 2005 because it optimizes their IT infrastructure for growth and improves their alignment with key business objectives. With up to 35% faster transaction processing, advanced business intelligence solutions and enhanced developer productivity, SQL Server 2005 builds on the strengths of SQL Server 2000. Enterprise and midmarket organizations upgrading to SQL Server 2005 will not only accelerate growth but also open exciting new opportunities for database administrators, developers and IT decision makers.