Solver Foundation at TechFest: Day 1

TechFest Day 1 was a blast.  Tuesday is the "public day" where the press, partners, and academics are invited to check out a limited set of TechFest demos, including Solver Foundation.  Me, Lengning and two of our colleagues from Microsoft Research manned the booth.  A bit about our booth setup - we have one side of a booth, the other side is occupied by a research team from India working on some very cool security stuff.  We have a desktop and two laptops, and we are rocking three monitors - five screens total.  That's a lot of demo real estate!

Rick Rashid and Craig Mundie toured first but we did not have the chance to talk to them - maybe later in the week.  Everyone else started filing in around 10:00.  We had a great crowd and it was kind of a festive atmosphere.  I had a bit of time to walk around and see some of the other demos, and had a lot of fun hearing from the researchers and trying stuff out.  But the highlight for me was getting to talk about Solver Foundation with the press, with colleagues, with partners, and acedemics.  I had some great exchanges with folks who didn't know a lot about optimization but were totally "hooked" by the end of our chat.  We demoed a bunch of the samples that come with Solver Foundation, walked people through the architecture and brainstormed about possible applications.

Tomorrow and Thursday, TechFest is open for Microsoft employees, and I anticipate lots of good conversations, and hopefully the chance to see some old friends.  Check out the TechFest website for info about the demos, posters (here is ours), and links.  In the meantime, I will be clicking around to see if I got quoted anywhere ;)

Update: here's a screenshot from one of our demos.  In the foreground can see a WPF application for server load distribution; in the background you can see the Excel 2007 Solver Foundation add-in.