SoCalDevGal plays…MSDN Code Gallery – Solver Foundation

I know most of you know about CodePlex, but do you use the MSDN Code Gallery?  Both are FREE code repositories – so what is the difference you may ask.  From the FAQ:

Code Gallery is a community-enabled Web site where you can share developer information and resources such as sample applications and code snippets. CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site.  Code Gallery is a pure storage site, with no project management capabilities. If you need to manage a live code project, CodePlex is a better choice.

BTW..what is Microsoft Solver Foundation, you may ask.  From the abstract:

“Microsoft Solver Foundation is a new .Net-based system designed to contribute to an integrated business planning and optimization platform. Solver Foundation provides model-driven planning, scheduling, and optimization capabilities. This effort is conceived to be one part of an overall “360 degree” system that can address all business critical perspectives for business process simulation, analysis, definition, deployment, automation and full lifecycle management. Solver Foundation is focused on the initial part of this tool and model chain –planning, simulation (in v2), scheduling and optimization done during strategic decision making and business planning. Planning is understood to encompass risk modeling, process (flow) optimization, and simulation. Solver Foundation is a technology framework for providing these services to businesses and Microsoft technology partners. It delivers a set of extensible solvers underneath a framework to aide in business people making better strategic and tactical business decisions using modern operations research and mathematical programming techniques. The Solver Foundation system is designed to run in both stand-alone mode, for example as an Add-in for Excel2007, as well as part of a continuous planning/scheduling system with real-time constraints on performance and operation such as MBS’s Dynamics AX System. It is designed to support its own embedding in business server and information worker systems and to run in single-node topologies. Finally, Solver Foundation provides a rich and expressive decision modeling infrastructure for higher-level modeling of business systems using either our Optimization Modeling Language (OML) or any CLS-compliant .Net languages (e.g., C#, F#, C++, IronPython, IronRuby, etc.).”

So, go play – find some fun FREE stuff on CodePlex and/or MSDN Code Gallery.  Also share (via comments on the blog) – what did you find?  how did you like it?