Someone pm me asking why Tradelink sucks. Here is my tradelink review on page 11:
1. Almost no support. This is basically a dead project, almost no one in the discussion group of official website. There is like 1 message every 10 days or worse. Every message has to be approved and it takes forever.
2. The only guy who is the commerical "glean" guy is the only one answers anything. Most of his answer is "just use glean". Glean is the commercial product that download with tradelink, and you have to pay to unlock. So their plan/his plan is just having no support for open source tradelink, no document, no community even there is one but almost all answers are just "just use glean", then forcing people (well there are almost no people) to pay and use commercial glean with support.
3. As I said, there is no documentation. I have already explained why in point 2.
4. I believe the original goal of tradlink was really few people try to make a true open source trading system, but then somehow it becomes a forcing people to use commercial "glean" trap. Glean itself is extremely poor made and hang all the time, you can try it out then you know. All it does is just asking you to pay.
5. You don't even know what version of virtual studio to use in order to successfully compile stuff. Ask in the official forum? The answer is what you expected: "just use glean!". Check it out if you think I lie.
6. I really doubt the "27,000+ installs worldwide." part. The download count of TradeLinkSuite-3600.exe is just 812 since March 22 (today is May 8), which is extremely not active.
Conclusion: This is a good thing to play with and learn if someone wants to build his own system with C#. You have to have good programming skill in order to deal with everything on your own. There are no support and documentation, but the original tradelink (not glean) codes are good places to learn or improve purely by yourself if you are programming expert. It is better than building from scratch if you don't have a full-time trading system developing programming job experience.