Recently I learned ASP.Net, Its really nice technology for web application development. Google’s Orkut is ASP.Net application. But i just seen the webserver details of Orkut, they are running linux OS !!. I just shocked to see the working of ASP.Net on linux platform. So i did a bit research for it.

There exists one open source .Net development framework for Open source lovers, named MONO. Most probably Google is using Mono on their Linux servers to run the ASP.Net application.

According to Wikipedia,

Mono is a free and open source project led by Novell to create an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, BSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems.

We can also use .htaccess file of linux servers to give any extension to serving pages to fool the users, this might be the case with orkut, but the WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg have seen many ASP.Net error pages on orkut in early days of orkut. (Ignore fatal error on Matt’s blog). so we can say that Google is orkut using ASP.Net for Orkut.

Google’s survey site i.e. survey.googleratings.com is using Microsoft IIS to serve the dynamic ASP.Net pages, so will Google use the ASP.Net technology in future for few more products ? It will be really interesting to see whats next.