TechFest wrap-up

Whew - an exciting and tiring week is over.  We had hundreds of employees stop by our TechFest booth to ask questions, talk about their team's optimization or modeling problems, look at our demos, or simply hear more about Solver Foundation.   A big thanks to my teammates Lengning, Lucas, and Lin for doing such a great job this last week. 

OML - our declarative language for specifying optimization problems - was received with great interest.  Microsoft France's experience using Solver Foundation to schedule TechDays really "worked" as an example. Even our simple quadratic programming example in Excel opened a lot of eyes.  There several questions about data binding (and there have been some recent threads in our forums), so I think I'd like to devote a couple of posts to that.  Lastly, I was surprised to get several inquiries into our nonlinear unconstrained optimizer - that's an area I will devote some time to that as well.

I will be attending a couple of conferences over the next several months, but for now it's back to work on the next version of Solver Foundation.