Several years ago I remember when my boss at the time, Chris Brooks, and others at work set up and ran Terrarium, a .NET v1.0 app that allowed peer-to-peer networking of machines running code with "bugs" (not the defect kind) in a virtual environment. It was a sort of a survival-of-the-fittest-bug kind of game, and they used it at work to build some fun learning into the process.

Fast-forward a few years, and the team at Microsoft that originally built the Terrarium app has scattered to the wind. But Bill Simser, a solutions architect, avid .NET guy and Microsoft MVP for SharePoint, took the initiative to find the code inside Microsoft, update it to .NET v2.0, and released it on CodePlex for the community to use and help maintain.

It's now a client-server application and has a worldwide-participation capability (as well as single-machine and closed local peering capabilities). Pretty cool stuff.

If you're an individual, team or group that wants to get some practice or learn more about programming in .NET and you want to have some fun in the process, check out Terrarium v2.

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