Scott Guthrie announced on his blog today that Microsoft is going to release the full source code for the .NET framework! Now I get to really geek out on the .NET framework!! He says it will be released later this year along with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET framework 3.5. They must have moved up the release date as I remember reading on Soma's blog that the final 3.5 release wouldn't be until February 2008. It appears that nearly all of the .NET framework source code will be release. The two HUGE exception's that were not listed on ScottGu's blog is the WPF and Silverlight libraries - Microsoft's shiney new babies. Clearly this is all the buzz amongst the .NET development community - ScottGu has over 330 comments on his single blog post announcing this.

 Another cool thing - VS2008 is going to have .NET framework integrated debugging support built into it. You can actually step into the .NET framework code by setting a break point in your code!  You just don't get more open source than that people!

 In summary this totally kicks ass for me, as the .NET framework is the basis of what puts bread on my table, both at my job, and on all of my own websites.. For those who don't know what the .NET framwork is  - essentially it's the primary building blocks of the applications .NET developer's (read Microsoft developers') write. Until now, we didn't know how they were implemented, we only knew WHAT they did for us. Well now, we also will know HOW they do what they do for us.  This rules!

web development .net framework, source code