Thanks for visiting! I'm in the process of moving my blog, and I am starting with my most popular posts. An updated version of this post can be found here.

Thanks for visiting! I have moved my blog. An updated version of this post can be found here.

A few of us on the Solver Foundation team will be presenting at the INFORMS Practice Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.  I'm looking forward to it!  We have both a workshop and a session - I will also be participating in Gurobi's session to show off its integration with Solver Foundation.  Here are the details - looking forward to seeing you there.

Technology Workshop
Sunday, April 26, 9AM - 12PM
Microsoft Solver Foundation is a pure, managed code runtime for mathematical programming, modeling, and optimization. Microsoft Solver Foundation provides solvers and services to a broad community of users: from Excel users and analysts to programmers working on business critical scheduling, configuration, risk management and planning solutions. It provides services for model validation, parallel solving and workload scheduling, model interchange, and declarative data binding via LINQ and other NETFx technologies. As an open framework designed for third party extensibility, it exposes facilities for users to plug-in their own solvers while still leveraging all of the modeling services and capabilities of Microsoft Solver Foundation.

Software Tutorials
Monday, April 27, 9:10AM - 10:00AM
Solver Foundation is a framework and managed code runtime for mathematical programming, modeling and optimization. This tutorial will focus on the technical overview of Solver Foundation, and how Third-party solver vendors, modelers and solution specialists can leverage Solver Foundation from all CLS-compliant languages and Microsoft Office.

I am pleased to announce that Solver Foundation v1.2 is live on solverfoundation.com! Our goal in 1.2 was to make a few key improvements to address feedback that we have received from partners and customers. If you have feedback, questions, suggestions…please post it here, or on our MSDN forum. Positive or negative - that's okay. I am particularly interested in hearing how you use Solver Foundation in your application - or what features you would like to see.

Back to 1.2:

• The popular FICO Xpress is now a "certified partner". That means if you are an Xpress user, you can use Solver Foundation's plug-in model to write .Net applications without a hitch.
• Amsterdam Optimization is a certified modeling consultant for Solver Foundation. I've linked to Erwin's blog before - he's a member of this group. We are happy to be partnering with them.
• MIP start functionality has been added. This allows you to give a starting solution to a MIP model using SetInitialValue on Decision.
• Bug fixes - in particular we've taken care of a few QP issues.

I have been brushing up on keyboard shortcuts ever since I installed the Windows 7 beta on my laptop.  Tim Sneath has a great summary of keyboard shortcuts here, in particular I LOVE the window management shortcuts.  If you have IE8 you also probably know that Ctrl+Tab switches between browser tabs.  What I did not know, and just discovered by accident, is that Ctrl+Tab works in Visual Studio too.  You can use it to switch between active files and tool windows (e.g. the Solution Explorer or Class View).  The arrow keys work too.  I tend to have lots of active files at once, so this is a nice timesaver.

Feel free to share other cool shortcuts in the comments.

A side note: I am a Unix guy by background, and during my first two years at Microsoft I did all my development using the command shell + emacs.  But given the improvements that Visual Studio has made over the last 5 years, there is no way I would ever go back now!  I am anxiously awaiting their next release.