EasyLanguage Tutorial – Lesson 0

A new school year starts after the summer holidays here. This seems to be the perfect time to finally start something I had in mind for a long time. I wanted to create a set of Easylanguage tutorials that help users with starting to learn how to program in Multicharts and Tradestation.

At least help them in understanding basic coding principles. If you already have coding experience in either of the programs these EasyLanguage tutorials will probably not be for you.

The lessons will be geared towards Multicharts, as the build in PowerLanguage is more powerful than Tradestation’s EasyLanguage. At the same time what works within EasyLanguage will usually work within PowerLanguage, too. I will highlight differences in the two languages, thus making sure you can use the lessons for Tradestation, too.

Tradestation and Multicharts have expanded the programming capabilities of their software a lot over the last years. Tradestation has extended EasyLanguage with object oriented components. It’s called OOEL (object oriented EasyLanguage) which allows for more complex programming.
Multicharts.NET even takes it one step further as you can program in C# or VB.NET. This offers great possibilities for experienced programmers. Some brokers even offer Multicharts.NET for free.

As the EasyLanguage tutorials focus on the basics (and Multicharts.NET doesn’t use EasyLanguage or Powerlanguage anyway) I will concentrate on EasyLanguage and PowerLanguage first.
My goal is to create one lesson per week and I will try to have a couple of lessons ready for publishing in advance. So in case there will be little time, I still have something to publish for you.
As I said I will start with basic concepts focusing on EasyLanguage and PowerLanguage. If there is some feedback and demand we can focus on OOEL and MC.NET at a later stage.
Learning the concepts will require some effort from you, too. Reading the lessons can only be a starting point. If you really want to progress with the languages, you need to code for yourself. There is no way around practicing and I know it can be rough at times. It can however also be very rewarding. When you have struggled with a problem for a while and are finally able to solve it, you will be proud of yourself. I would strongly suggest that you type in the coding examples for yourself and not simply copy and paste them. This will already help in familiarizing yourself with the editor and the coding itself. You will lose this chance if you only import the source code I will include with every lesson.
I have the idea to include a couple of simple exercises at the end of each EasyLanguage tutorial. I am undecided if I should publish the solutions though. One idea would be that you can send me yours and I will take a look at them and send you my solutions. This of course is not mandatory, but can help you a lot in my opinion. Otherwise I could publish them with the next lesson. I would really appreciate feedback regarding what you would prefer. In general for the readers interested in the lessons, I would love to hear what you want to have included in the tutorials.

I am looking forward to create these EasyLanguage tutorials and I hope it will be helpful for some.