Mono and the Google Summer of Code 2009

Once again, the Mono project will be participating in the fabulous Google Summer of Code.

This is a great opportunity for students that want to get involved with open source to contribute, learn and get paid for their work during the summer.

We have been very lucky in recruiting some great students in the past years and these students have taken on some very sophisticated tasks over the years. MonoTorrent, ParallelFX, FastCGI for mod_mono, WinForms designer and theming, Gendarme development, Gtk# widgets and much more.

We have posted some ideas for students to get started, but students that are passionate about Mono should feel free to pitch their own ideas.

We tend to pick students for advanced projects over the milder, simpler tasks.

This year, I am excited about a few special projects:

• Making the Mono VM use LLVM as a code generation backend.
• Porting Mono.SIMD to new architectures.
• ParallelFX updates.
• Using NVidia's VDPAU library to provide a new codec implementation in Moonlight to support VC-1/H.264.
• Managed (C#) implementations of Dirac and Vorbis as Silverlight 3 codecs.
• A Database designer Add-in for MonoDevelop to support DBML editing.

There are many more of course, but the above are the ones that are making me drool.