Programming is about the language you enjoy developing with, so if .Net can run on Linux it is a good thing, according to one Microsoft development evangelist.

Senior program manager for Microsoft’s developer division Scott Hanselman spends most of his time doing community liaison, including “speaking and evangelizing”.

In Sydney to speak at this year’s Tech.Ed conference, Hanselman said the Mono team is full of exceptionally talented developers who have done a good job getting .Net on Linux.

“Mono has unit testing and continuous integration [and] they have an extensive unit testing framework,” Hanselman said. “It's about the language you enjoy writing, so if I can run .Net on Linux that’s great.”

Hanselman is no stranger to open source as he’s the lead developer for dasBlog, one of the first open source blogs to run on Mono.

He also wrote BabySmash! for his two-year-old and five-month-old children so they could bang on the keyboards of his Windows machines “without hurting anything”.

“I deliberately wrote BabySmash! the wrong way using 10-year-old thinking,” Hanselman said. “A buddy of mine converted BabySmash! from the desktop to Silverlight and it took him about four days as the XAML user interface was sufficiently similar.”

Hanselman also commended the open source Moonlight project that allows Silverlight applications to run on Linux.

The source code for BabySmash! is also freely available. It is being used as an educational tool and has been good for “stress testing video graphics cards”.

Prior to joining Microsoft about a year ago, Hansleman spent 15 years building banking systems and lived through the Web 1.0 bubble.

Hanselman said the .Net 3.5 Framework SP1 has a lot of new, cool features that have been overlooked.

“One of things people don't realize is underneath .Net 3.5 is the ASP.Net 2.0 stuff,” he said. “You won't break the old application and they can run side by side all under IIS7. I can even run my classic ASP applications that are 10 years old.”

Recently Hanselman, sporting his own iPhone, has been looking at how an ASP app can help detect an iPhone visit and give the right experience by automatically resizing the site.

“The goal is to show how flexible .Net is for serving that type of content,” he said.