C# Projects and Bloomberg

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My Summer 2010 Internship at Bloomberg L.P. -- Financial Software Developer
screenshot

Almost everything I developed at Bloomberg was written using C#, the .NET framework, and the Silverlight 3 API. I had many projects, and they were all developed for a variety of uses. Some of these projects included:

An image cropping tool for internal Bloomberg web developers,
Creation of a presentation building tool (similar to Final Cut, Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, etc...) for the Bloomberg News Editing Staff,
A corresponding media player embedded in the terminal for clients,
Designing of a new upload interface for Bloomberg Photographers to upload images to the servers,
Cleaning up the interface of a video upload tracking tool for internal debugging purposes,
Multiple web services, for Bloomberg Photographers to upload images to the servers,
And an .aspx downloading tool for quick, external media access.

As far as the internship goes, I spent the entire 12 weeks at their headquarters (pictured on the right), located on 59th and Lexington, New York, New York. The offices are beautiful, and the overall internship program really was a great learning experience. I was given several opporitunities to present my work to full-time software staff; and even got the chance to demo my work to Bloomberg editors, as my work moved to full production before summer was actually over. It really did feel great to see my personal code get moved to global production, across all terminals, around the globe. Below I will briefly cover some of the projects I worked on, their included features, and a few relevant screenshots.

Multimedia Presentation Editor and the Corresponding Terminal-Based Client Player

List of Included Editor Features:

Drag and Drop internal Bloomberg media assets
(from terminal window)

Import of local media assets from your PC's hard drive

Audio and Video/Image Timelines (with time marks)

Audio/Video splicing

Preview playback options

Caption settings

Bloomberg function links

Timeline swapping

Timeline duration resizing

Security/Privledge checking

Local file server uploads

Mute options for videos

Stack-Based image timeline

Clean/Professional UI and hotkeys; Easy to use

Editor/Player Screenshots
Editor Interface	Presentation Upload
Client-Side Player	Bloomberg Media Search

Click on the images to get a better view!

Whenever you export a presentation, an XML file and all local assets are upload to the server. Then, when a client requests playback, the player parses through the XML file, downloads required media, and then plays back accordingly. Everything for this project was written in C# and Javascript (the JS is internal and exclusive to their terminal embedding).

Multimedia Presentation Editor and the Corresponding Terminal-Based Client Player

Image Crop Screenshots
Gumpert Apollo	Loading Screen
NYSE Floor	John Deere

Click on the images to get a better view!

Previously, when editors needed to resize images in the database, they first had to download the image, open up an application (such as photoshop), re-crop it manually, delete the old record of the image on the server, and then upload and submit a fresh copy. To help streamline an editor's work-flow, I built this new interface and function in about a week.

Now, to re-crop an image, simply click the "re-crop" button, draw a box, confirm, and then all image manipulation is automatically done server-side.

There no risk with the wrong image being uploaded, dimensions will always be perfect as I'm executing the cropping, and there's no photoshop experience necessary from our photographers or editors. Cropping literally takes 10 seconds now, rather than minutes previously.

Part-Time C# Development Position at the Ohio State University
	During my senior year at Ohio State I am working for a sociology professor, designing an access database and WPF front-end article browser. He is doing some research on the financial crisis, and wants hundreds of articles downloaded from places such as the WSJ, NYT, etc.. for analysis. I am tasked building a nice tool to analyze article quotations, and then allow his graduate students to add metadata to the articles for storage in the databse. They will eventually be writing a couple papers making conclusions about the research. All data is stored in an access database, and the WPF is obviously all C#/XAML. The picture depicted here on the left is a screenshot of that WPF interface. Eventually, once this part of the project is complete, I will also be working on a couple flash presentation templates such as tag clouds, charts and graphs. Because of my previous flash experience, these could be critically useful in regards to his data and research presentations.

Part-Time C# Development Position at the Ohio State University

During my senior year at Ohio State I am working for a sociology professor, designing an access database and WPF front-end article browser. He is doing some research on the financial crisis, and wants hundreds of articles downloaded from places such as the WSJ, NYT, etc.. for analysis. I am tasked building a nice tool to analyze article quotations, and then allow his graduate students to add metadata to the articles for storage in the databse. They will eventually be writing a couple papers making conclusions about the research. All data is stored in an access database, and the WPF is obviously all C#/XAML. The picture depicted here on the left is a screenshot of that WPF interface.

Eventually, once this part of the project is complete, I will also be working on a couple flash presentation templates such as tag clouds, charts and graphs. Because of my previous flash experience, these could be critically useful in regards to his data and research presentations.