Mono group seeks a home at Microsoft's PDC

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is the place to be for all things .Net. That is unless you favor running .Net applications on Linux, apparently.

Miguel De Icaza, the leader of the Mono project, in a recent blog said that his request for a "Birds of a Feather" break-out session at Microsoft's PDC 2005 in September has not been accepted.

De Icaza noted that his attempt to create a BOF session at PDC 2003, which requires a vote, also didn't pan out. And he said he never got a satisfactory answer why.

"I would be happy with an honest answer even if it is 'We do not want to promote open source/Mono/Novell' instead I heard a number of variations on 'The problem is that `New frontiers for 6502 assembly language in the copy-editing industry had more votes'" (it didn't),' he wrote.

So De Icaza is planning on doing a meeting at some unofficial spot, as they did last time which drew about 80-100 people.

A few bloggers have come to De Icaza's side in advance of the PDC. In fact, people like Tim Anderson and Stephen Walli argue that promoting Mono is a benefit to Microsoft.

In his post, Walli says: "This is such a missed opportunity for Microsoft. Microsoft needs Mono...(Microsoft should) encourage Mono and then deliver the better integrated experience for writing web services on .NET."