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Solver Foundation at TechFest: my "pitch"

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Another busy day - we spoke with literally hundreds of Microsoft employees about Solver Foundation at TechFest '09.  Microsoft is a huge company, so we got a chance to talk to people from many different parts of the company with varying backgrounds.  Some are intimately familiar with optimization, others are not.  So part of the challenge is to try to "meet people where they are at" and talk about Solver Foundation in a way that makes sense for them, without trivializing it or making it sound like magic beans.  If you had the opportunity to come by our booth tomorrow, you'd get a few cool demos, and a variation on the following "pitch".  Depending on what you wanted to talk about we could talk more about how to model real problems, or maybe the API, or maybe some of the solvers that we're developing.  Or maybe the stock market, or how it sucked to lose the Sonics.  If people leave with a good idea of what we're about and can think of some situations where Solver Foundation could help, I'm happy.  Anyway, here's goes:

People and businesses need to be able to juggle different priorities and constraints to make good decisions.  Examples include production planning, scheduling projects, configuring IT systems, advertising online.  Microsoft Solver Foundation is a managed code platform for planning, scheduling, configuration, and optimization.   Solver Foundation lets you easily describe your problem, get it solved, and connect it to your application. 

It has three main layers:
 • Modeling and Programming: the modeler lets you describe optimization problems declaratively: "what", not "how".  You can do it in code, or in our Excel add-in.
 • Solver Foundation Services: a full-featured .Net library that can be accessed from Visual Studio, C#, VB, ASP.Net, Silverlight.  It transparently handles parallelism & multiple cores.  It provides a rich object model, events, and data binding.
 • Solvers: we provide a bunch of solvers that cover a wide range of optimization problems including: LP, QP, constraint, MIP, nonlinear unconstrained.  We feature an open, extensible architecture that lets plug-in third party solvers if you so choose.

Solver Foundation is developed in conjunction with researchers in Redmond and Cambridge, and is a great example of Microsoft Research innovation.  We recently released our 1.1 version and you can check out solverfoundation.com to download our free Express version!

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