The Solver Foundation team has been hard at work on our next release. We want to take a break from the action to share some details about we plan to ship. Our focus is to broaden the range of real-world models that can be created, solved and analyzed using Solver Foundation Services (SFS) and OML. Here are some of the features we plan to include:

• A new local search solver that covers the full expressiveness of SFS.
• The Compact Quasi-Newton solver will fully accessible from OML and SFS - without the need for specifying gradient information.
• 18 new OML operators: If, Exp, Log, Floor, Ceiling, Sin, Cosh, ArcTan, etc.
• Full plug-in support for nonlinear and mixed-integer nonlinear solvers. Metaheuristic and gradient-based solvers alike can be easily plugged into Solver Foundation.
• Automatic differentiation support.
• New plug-in solvers.
• Mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) plug-in support.
• Improved exception object model, including programmatically accessible location information.
• Solver Foundation Services improvements, including multiple model support.
• Improved Excel add-in data binding support.

The next version of Solver Foundation will require .Net 4.0, because it takes advantage of new .Net 4.0 features. Existing Solver Foundation code, OML models, and plug-in solvers will continue to work without changes.

We will update the blog and MSDN forum with more information about the release as we draw closer to our November release.

- Solver Foundation Team