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(via Scripting News)
Terrarium, a sample application built by Microsoft, is game for software developers that provides a great introduction to software development on the .NET Framework. In Terrarium, developers create herbivores, carnivores, or plants and then introduce them into a peer-to-peer, networked ecosystem for a survival-of-the-fittest type competition.
This sounds nice (many of you will remember Axelrod's repeated prisoner dilemma competitions). I use something like this when I teach about multi-tasking. Still, this is not really programming language related... But read on:
At present, creatures for Terrarium can be developed in either C# or Visual Basic .NET. This is to prevent cheating. As mentioned earlier, when a creature is loaded, its code is scanned by the Terrarium client to ensure that it does not harbor any functionality that could give it an unfair advantage over the other creatures. Static methods, threading calls, and deconstructors could all be used to effectively cheat. Unfortunately, some language compilers automatically generate a static constructor method, for example. The Terrarium code scan picks up on this and denies that code the right to run. In the future, Terrarium will support more programming languages.
Now that's what I call multi-language support: you can either use VB.Net (from Microsoft) or C# (which is made by guess who). I am sure this is a coincidence..
Still, you may be interested in reading the short description of Evidence-based and Code Access Security
Posted to cross-language-runtimes by Ehud Lamm on 3/12/02; 8:35:23 AM
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Terrarium
