I used to develop code in the days before any IDE's. Am now retired and have been using Wealthlab for some time.

I'm comfortable with writing indicators and strategies. Now I'd like to develop my own indicator library. Have read the "Creating an Indicator Library in Wealth-Lab Pro" FAQ. I have no problem putting the code together.

Got .NET 3.5 and SharpDevelop installed.

But I need some sort of a basic tutorial for interacting with the IDE, linking with Wealthlab, creating the DLL, etc. (Writing code nowadays largely consists of navigating a bureaucracy, which is difficult to do without some sort of a roadmap!)

Can anyone point me to such a tutorial? If not, any words of wisdom would be appreciated.

Thanks.

To help start with less bureaucracy possible, here we have an example of a fully functioning indicator library:

Home - Community Indicators

The idea is to load it in an IDE, fix the References (point the IDE to your main Wealth-Lab folder under Program Files), fix the build Destination directory (from MS123\Wealth-Lab Developer 6 to Fidelity Investments\Wealth-Lab Pro 6 in your case), and hit "Debug".

Thank you, Eugene. Your advice got me moving. Much appreciated.

I am trying to follow your advice on how to start with the development of my own indicator library but I am getting the following debug error:

Error 1 Unable to copy file "obj\Debug\WealthLab.Indicators.Community.dll" to "..\..\..\..\..\..\..\Program Files\MS123\Wealth-Lab Developer 6\WealthLab.Indicators.Community.dll". Access to the path '..\..\..\..\..\..\..\Program Files\MS123\Wealth-Lab Developer 6\WealthLab.Indicators.Community.dll' is denied. WealthLab.Indicators.Community

Can you please help me with that?

Start Visual Studio (or whatever you use) with admin privileges explicitly, by right-clicking the shortcut and selecting "Run as admin".

Added to the Wiki FAQ for other Vista/Win7 users to see:

I'm getting an "access denied" error while building my extension in Visual Studio or SharpDevelop.

Thanks Eugene

Although your advice worked with compiling the community.indicators class library I am trying to now to compile a class library project of my own and I get the following message:

" A project with an output type of class Library cannot be started directly.

In order to debug this project, add an executable project to this solution which references the library project. Set the executable project as the startup project. "

What am I doing wrong?

In short, you're trying to start a DLL project directly whereas an application like Wealth-Lab is meant to be loading DLLs. This is a general Visual Studio related situation, nothing related to Wealth-Lab so I highly recommend to google this error message if you like to have a better understanding of what's going on.

Our sample projects work because I have preconfigured them for VS Express as I explained in this KB article: Debugging a Strategy with Visual Studio Express or SharpDevelop, scroll down to "Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 Express Editions (C# and VB .NET)". With full-blown Visual Studio, you may either specify the executable name in your project's properties or choose Debug/Attach to Process.

Eugene,

Many thanks for your detailed reply. I did compile the library and I found my own indicator folder within WL environment as expected. Just one thing to mention as per the TestLibrary.csproj.user file mentioned in the KB article:

In the line:

<StartProgram>c:\Program Files\Fidelity Investments\Wealth-Lab Pro 6\WealthLabPro.exe</StartProgram>

the path should be replaced with "c:\Program Files\MS123\Wealth-Lab Developer 6" for Wealth-Lab Developer users.

Right, and the KB article section is instructing to do just that ;)