Solver Foundation on Hanselminutes

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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.