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[.net] Microsoft Releasing the Source Code to .NET

Started by JWalsh Oct 4, 2007 at 4:04 PM 5 replies 1.9k views

Original Post

Oct 4, 2007 at 4:04 PM

I just wanted to pass this along, in case nobody had seen it yet: Scott Gu's Blog For those that dont like to follow links: "One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ)." "The final release of VS 2008 will support the ability to configure the debugger to dynamically download the .NET Framework debugger symbols (and corresponding source code) from a web server hosted by Microsoft. You'll be able to configure the .NET Framework symbols to be downloaded all in one shot, or manually retrieved on demand..." Cheers!

SiCrane

Oct 4, 2007 at 4:30 PM

This could be my memory playing tricks on me, but weren't they going to do this with MSVC 2005 and then change their minds?

Promit

Oct 4, 2007 at 4:33 PM

Personally I think "revealing" would be more apt a choice of words than "releasing". In any case, it'll be convenient not to fire up Reflector constantly to do this sort of thing.

Oluseyi

Oct 4, 2007 at 5:31 PM

License? If it's Shared Source, it'll be useful to .NET developers content to build on top of the Microsoft implementation, but not to developers who might be interested in building implementations for alternative platforms.

Ooh! Microsoft Reference License. Very cool. Should help Mono, for sure, and might get dotGnu back in the running. This is officially a Good Thing™. [smile]

OrangyTang

Oct 4, 2007 at 6:08 PM

Quote:
Original post by Oluseyi
Ooh! Microsoft Reference License. Very cool. Should help Mono, for sure, and might get dotGnu back in the running. This is officially a Good Thing™. [smile]

I've not seen that license before, anyone care to explain exactly what it means? From what I gather, you can look at it all you want, and pinch the ideas and concepts from it to build your own version, but you can't copy the code verbatim?

Mithrandir

Oct 9, 2007 at 7:15 PM

Kinda cool.

I've been using .NET Reflector for all those times when I needed to figure out what .NET does underneath, which wasn't really all that often, to be honest. I think the biggest thing it cleared up for me was figuring out how the network stream class worked.

Anyway, still cool.

Oluseyi

Oct 9, 2007 at 10:43 PM

Quote:
Original post by OrangyTang
From what I gather, you can look at it all you want, and pinch the ideas and concepts from it to build your own version, but you can't copy the code verbatim?

Correct, but more important are the limitations. (Incidentally, I appreciate its brevity!) No trademark grants, sue-us-and-you're-out, and the typical no-warranty clause.

I like.

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