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Visual Studio developers will have to choose from a list of ASP.Net 2.0 applications at the start of each race and port them using their development environment of choice, such as Mainsoft's Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview, Novell's Mono, PHP and Ruby.

The first past the post in each race wins a Nintendo Wii console, while the fastest overall porter takes home $200 in games and accessories. Wii consoles will also be handed out to the fastest port in Mono and Grasshopper.

The resulting ports have to replicate the look, feel, and functionality of the original ASP.NET 2.0 application running on Apache Tomcat on Novell SUSE on an IBM server.

According to a recent survey by The Code Project, there should be

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a number of contenders for the race: more than a quarter of Visual Studio developers use Linux development tools.

The Mono Project's Miguel de Icaza predicts that the fast-rack route to getting hold of a Wii console is by porting an ASP.NET 2.0 application. 'It is a lot easier to port an application in ASP.NET from Windows to Linux in a record time than it is to keep bidding on EBay for the console and the controls. Been there, been outbidded time and time again,' he wrote.

The race dates are 23, 30 March and 6 April.

More activity on promoting the adoption of Linux will come to light in the upcoming Annual Associate Member Meeting of the Free Software Foundation at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology.

It is casting 2007 as 'Year of the Upgrade', with speakers, including Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen focussing on hardware and compliance issues, as well as the third version of the GNU General Public License.

Most recently, the Free Software Foundation released a paper on 'the road to hardware free from restrictions', building on initiatives to help hardware manufacturers to create Linux drivers and examining barriers such as DRM.