The Race to Linux challenges Visual Studio developers to port existing ASP.NET applications to Linux using their cross-platform tool of choice (e.g. Grasshopper, Mono, PHP, Macromedia, etc.). The applications to be ported to run on Linux will be announced at the start of each race. The hardware used for judging will be IBM xSeries.
The winners of each of the three races will win an Xbox 360. In addition, contestants using Grasshopper will also qualify to win an Xbox 360 game of their choice. Limit one Xbox 360 and one game per participant.
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I've been checking this stuff out recently, so I have a bit of an idea about these technologies.
Grasshopper is a free Visual Studio plugin (For the uninitiated, Visual Studio is Microsoft's development environment for Windows). It compiles .Net IL code (native output of Visual Studio) to Java bytecode, so that you can apparently run .Net applications as Java apps. IIRC, they also (necessarily) provide an implementation of the .Net framework for Java - on looking it up, I see that they use grasshopper to recompile Mono as java bytecode.
Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net framework, which works on Linux. Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Windows, so a much greater reach than Microsoft's own .Net framework. I'm currently rebuilding my website as an ASP.Net application, developing using Visual Studio 2003 on Windows 2003 server using IIS, but deploying to some Linux based webspace using Mono and Apache. I'm using MySQL for the database. It's early days, but this cockamamie approach actually seems to be working :-)
So from the site above, it seems that the race is about porting a C# .net application to Linux, any way that you deem fit; you can rewrite it entirely in PHP if you want to, but it is a race! Using Grasshopper to make it a Java application is different to using Mono to run your IL code as-is on Linux, but both approaches are likely to be the most promising.
Will I enter the competition? Not sure... I might give it a try...
