Solver Foundation on Hanselminutes

Nathan Brixius — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:57:00 GMT

The latest edition of Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcast features yours truly. We talked about Solver Foundation, numerical optimization, and good old-fashioned code optimization. Scott's a great guy and doing the podcast was a lot of fun.

Those of you new to Solver Foundation (or this blog) may be curious about what you can actually do with Solver Foundation. Here is the download location for the free Express version of Solver Foundation. I hope that by listening to the podcast you already know the basics, so here are a few code-oriented posts:

Here is a short description of “what’s new” in our 2.0 release.
Here is a C# sample that solves traveling salesman problems.
Here is a LINQ to SQL sample using Solver Foundation.
Here is an F# sample. The F# integration features a domain specific language for creating optimization problems. It also supports “units of measure”, meaning you can associate real-life units such as miles, gallons, dollars, or touchdowns to parameters and decisions.
Erwin did a really nice post on doing portfolio management using Solver Foundation and Excel. I like the visuals. In fact Erwin's site has a number of great samples and documents.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Solver Foundation ships with TONS of samples that span languages, scenarios, and solvers.

The last part of our conversation was about writing high-performance code. I'll share some thoughts about that later this week.

Resource constrained scheduling; OML tutorials

Nathan Brixius — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:43:00 GMT

Two weeks back I posted two articles showing how easy it is to model critical path scheduling using Microsoft Solver Foundation. I received a few emails asking about various extensions; I will be covering those in upcoming posts. Julian just wrote a great blog post that covers the most commonly requested extension - resource constrained scheduling. If you are getting started with Solver Foundation and want to see an interesting, instructive example, I encourage you to check out his post. Two things that I really like about his OML:

He separates the data from the model description using Parameters.
He relies on the Foreach construct to define his constraints. It results in a very clean model definition.

Julian mentions it in his post, but I also want to call out another great resource for learning OML. Erwin Kalvalagen has written an OML tutorial which includes several interesting examples. It's a great complement to the Excel Programming Primer that is part of the Solver Foundation documentation.

Nathan Brixius : project scheduling

Solver Foundation on Hanselminutes

Resource constrained scheduling; OML tutorials