Installation

Requirements

While the backtester is cross-platform, for most users we recommend the following:

• Windows 10 or higher
• Visual Studio (recommended), VS Code, or a similar IDE capable of working with .NET code
• Microsoft Excel for reporting.

Visual Studio setup

Visual Studio is the flagship integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is an extremely capable and mature product. Even better, the Community Edition is available free for individuals and small companies. If you are installing Visual Studio for the first time, make sure to select ”.NET desktop development” when prompted for workloads. This will install the .NET components needed to run the backtester, as well as C#, the language used in this documentation.

If you aren’t using Visual Studio, see the instructions for how to install on your platform.

Licensing

Please take a moment to read and understand the license agreement. The backtester software is licensed product and uses a cryptographic key tied to your physical machine. The standard license allows a single user to activate the license on a primary machine and one backup machine (e.g. laptop for travel). Please contact us with any questions, to request a trial key, or for offline licensing options.

Activation

Activation is a one-time procedure. From a command prompt, install the Licensing Tool by typing:

dotnet tool install Balsam.LicensingTool --global

Note

This assumes you already have Visual Studio or VS Code installed with the appropriate workload for .NET desktop development or the .NET SDK.

Upon successful installation you should see a message similar to this:

You can invoke the tool using the following command: Balsam.LicensingTool
Tool 'balsam.licensingtool' (version '1.0.6') was successfully installed.

After the licensing tool has been installed, activate your machine by entering the following in the command prompt, replacing ‘xxxx’ with your actual license key pasted from the clipboard (license keys are quite long).

balsam.licensingTool activate --key xxxx

Caution

Your license key should be kept private.

To see other available options you can use the built-in help:

balsam.licensingTool help

Tip

If you want to transfer the backtester to another machine, the licensing tool can be used to deactivate the current machine. Then repeat the installation process on the new machine. Deactivating will not delete any files other than the offline license file.