In all the news and hectic schedule of last week at TechEd I forgot to post this but Micosoft has released version 2.0 of the .NET Stock Trader application. You can get information and download it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader. The application is an implementation of the Stock Trader 6.1 application by IBM and is functionally equivalent. The major changes over version 1.0 of the application is that it has been upgraded to the .NET Framework v3.5 and takes advantage of some of the new features. The application has been benchmarked and is faster than the IBM implementation. In addition to being a showcase for a faster application it also shows interoperability. At TechEd this week there were demos of this application and other vendor's implementations working together.

A lot of the press around the application centers on the configuration service that allows you to visualize the nodes in your distributed application as well as changing settings that are then distributed to all the nodes. While that is cool technology and certainly useful I am excited by having an application built for several different vendor stacks that allows me to compare and contrast how each vendor does the same thing so I can learn from the industry in an apples-to-apples type comparison.