News

We’re happy to announce the release of Resolver One 1.8! As always, you can download it here.

The big news in version 1.8 is that it supports IronPython 2.6. This not only supports the improved Python 2.6 syntax, but also adds some significant performance improvements, and makes the whole application much “snappier”. It’s well worth trying just for that, but we’ve also added a bunch of other useful features:

• A new workbook property RecalculateAfter, which if set in user code triggers another recalculation after the given number of seconds.
• Support for new statistics functions: NORMDIST, NORMSDIST, ERF and ERFC.
• A new GetExternalWorkbook function to import Microsoft Excel .xls files from user code.
• Various other functions that we were missing for compatibility with other spreadsheet applications.
• And, of course, a number of bugfixes and performance enhancements.

If you want more details, here is a full list of every change in this release.

Don’t forget, we have forums to discuss and ask questions about Resolver One, and there is detailed documentation too.

We have had a number of queries about whether QuantLib works in Resolver One. QuantLib is “a free/open-source library for modeling, trading, and risk management in real-life.” We thought it would be great if we could confirm that it works with Resolver One. The short answer is: “It does!”.

Since a build of QuantLib and the .Net bindings can take most of a day (the bulk of it waiting for builds to complete), we decided to provide pre-built binaries and an example so our customers can try it out immediately.

For obvious reasons, at Resolver Systems we’re big fans of using Python for financial computation. As such, we’re keen to promote the London Financial Python Users Group, which was founded by Didrik Pinte of Enthought.

If you’re in the London area and are interested in coming to the Group’s next meeting, here are the details:

Date/time: Feb 3, 2010 at 7pm
Location: KBC Financial Products at their offices: 111 Old Broad Street, EC2N 1FP (just opposite Tower 42).

All are welcome, but for security reasons you need to register in advance; just drop an email to Didrik Pinte.

The topics planned for this meeting are:

• Improving NumPy performance with the Intel MKL – Didrik Pinte, Enthought
• Python to Excel bridges:
  • “PyXLL, a user friendly Python-Excel bridge” – Tony Roberts
  • Discussion on connecting Python and Excel (xlrd/xlwt, pyinex, win32com, pyxll, …)
• Speeding up Python code using Cython – Didrik Pinte, Enthought

We’re now going through the final internal testing phase for Resolver One version 1.8. The biggest change for this release is that we’ve moved on to IronPython 2.6, which brings with it a solid boost in performance and responsiveness. We’ve also added a number of new worksheet functions, made some performance improvements of our own, and fixed a number of bugs.

If all goes well, we should have a release candidate ready to download by the end of the week.

This is the first in an occasional series highlighting interesting things we’ve seen done (or are doing ourselves) with Resolver One.

Giles Thomas (who is CTO at Resolver Systems) has been playing around with 3D graphics in his spare time, and has managed to work out a way to tie it into Resolver One; here are the first three parts of his ongoing series of posts

1. A bouncing cube following a path in a Resolver One spreadsheet
2. A simulated solar system, with planets’ orbits calculated in the spreadsheet
3. 3D charting of stock prices from Yahoo! Finance