Ibasic Pro is an easy to use Basic compiler that creates DLLs that can be called by NeuroShell Trader Pro and DayTrader Pro (see www.pyxia.com) . Best of all, Ibasic Pro costs only about $70 at this writing. (UPDATE 9/8/05 – The price on their website is now only $49.99 – you can’t afford NOT to buy it now!) We downloaded the demo version and created a simple DLL in just a few minutes. Our little example takes an input time series (say the close) and returns that time series times 0.9. Then we made an indicator template using the NeuroShell Trader Pro indicator called “External DLL Call by Array” which you will find in the category “External Program and Library Calls”. Then we moved the .tpl and .dll files to the NeuroShell Template folder.

To download the source code (which can be read in the Windows Notepad), the DLL, and the NeuroShell Template file, click here.

Programming notes:

1. We passed the input time series as an Ibasic array because Ibasic does not force us to use pointer notation. Arrays are by default passed by reference. So we told NeuroShell to pass the time series as BYREF DOUBLE *

2. In IBasic, the INT keyword specifies a long (4 byte) integer. We told NeuroShell the count was to be passed by NeuroShell as BYVAL LONG. Do not use the Ibasic 64 bit integers.

3. When you compile, IBasic wants a target. Choose Windows DLL.

4. Our example program returned the NeuroShell “missing value” (which shows on the chart as a blank) for the first 20 bars on the chart. The only reason we did this was to show you how in case you later build an indicator that requires a number of initial bars before it returns any value. This would be the case, for example, with a 20 bar moving average).

5. For more programming ideas, you can review our C and PowerBasic examples. Just remember the syntax is different, of course.