Microsoft Hosts: GNOME & Mono Festival of Love

Coming up in a few weeks will be the "GNOME and Mono Festival of Love", a hack-fest being held at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center.

Over at the Microsoft NERD in Boston, the 2012 GNOME & Mono Festival of Love will be held from the 26th of June through thre 2nd of July. From their Wiki page, this event is described as, "The GNOME platform is populated with a number of highly popular applications driven by Mono. The aim of the hackfest is to enable these applications to take better advantage of the GNOME platform as well as to increase their reach."

Among the goals for this GNOME-Mono event is to implement a Tomboy library, port Banshee to GNOME3, Pint improvements, F-Spot improvements, debate the future of GTK#, and much more. An alpha release of Gtk#3 may also come as a result of this multi-day hacking session at the Microsoft facilities. Below are the ways they're measuring success from the event.

- Banshee with WebKit sources such as the Amazon store on all platforms (as opposed to being Linux-only presently). Additionally Banshee's move to GTK#3 should be complete and an rdio extension should have been added. Finally all changes required to provide bundles on Linux, Windows and OS X will be integrated in the upstream bockbuild repository.
- An alpha version of Tomboy based on the Tomboy library.
- MonoDevelop will have an extension for the Plastic version control system.
- Both Pinta and F-Spot should be generally improved.

While the event is being led by David Nielsen, at the event will be Miguel de Icaza and a variety of other GNOME/Mono developers. Microsoft is sponsoring the venue while Fluendo, Xamarin, and GNOME are sponsoring some of the travel and lodging expenses. While some may not like Microsoft sponsoring an increasing number of Linux / open-source things, the NERD venue itself is at least nice and is located right by/at M.I.T. Mono is also already within the Microsoft camp.

Find more details for those interested on the GNOME.org Live Wiki page.