[R-SIG-Finance] Building a GUI with R

[Alex Park]

Hello

I am a private investor and have been wondering about the feasibility of
building my own personal piece of software to help with my investing. In
particular, I am thinking of a desktop application that has the following
features:

- Ability to open up a number of charts and be able to select markets /
stocks from a pre-populated list 

- Ability to have a trading log so I can book my own trades and see my
annualised returns and how this compares to various benchmarks

- Ability to link to a variety of data sources (e.g. FRED) and financial
news sources etc.

- Statistical framework so I can easily compare correlations within markets,
perform regressions etc.

As a bit of background, I used to do some of this in Excel in a crude way
using VBA. Then I discovered R and started investigating .NET (VB, C#, C++).
I think R is terrific for analysis and the functions it offers are great
e.g. getting Yahoo quotes, accessing FRED database etc.

What I'd like to do is build my own software in .NET (e.g. build trading log
GUI, place my daily market data within database etc.) but also have access
to R from within the software so that I can use it to build sophisticated
charts, do stats analysis, connect to different data sources e.g. Yahoo etc.

My question is: does this seem like a step to far for an amateur programmer
like me and / or does anybody have an experience in doing similar and could
advise on (a) whether .NET is best way to go, and (b) potential pitfalls.

Any comments gladly received.

Regards

Alex