.Net Jonesie - This is HUGE!

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Scott Guthrie has blogged that MS will be releasing the source for .Net 3.5 Base Class Libraries. He also said "later this year" which might be a hint for a release date for VS 08.

I remember back a few years when I was using Delphi. It shipped with the source for it's base libraries (VCL) and I often referred to this to find out why things worked the way they did - or not. When I switched to .Net, I missed this for quite a while.

This is a huge benefit to developers and will help to remove any remaining barriers that some OS zealots like to rant about. Well done!

Thursday, October 04, 2007 8:45:52 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Comments [2] |

Thursday, October 04, 2007 12:55:32 PM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Look don't touch is not open source...

The source is being supplied under a very restrictive Reference Licence. You can debug into the BCL but you cannot alter, fix or otherwise change the source and you cannot recompile it.

It is not open source. It does not remove any barriers, it simply makes it easier to see where the framework is tripping you up and how you can create a workaround in your code.

Ayende puts it best in http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/10/04/Look-dont-touch-Clearing-the-misconceptions-about-opening-CLR-libraries.aspx

Neal Blomfield

Saturday, October 13, 2007 6:55:50 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Yes, good point, but I am very happy to tell Microsoft exactly what is wrong with their code and have them control it. For a product that is so widely used it would be incredibly dangerous to allow the community to control it - it wold very quickly fragment into 12 distro's of varying quality.

Peter

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