Another step in the direction of openness of the .Net code, this is how Visual Studio 2008 will enable developers to step into the code for .Net while debugging their products.  Scott is a fantastic man to follow if you want to develop for the MS platform.

Some people are mis-quoting this access to information as .Net going open, which is not true at all.  If you read Microsoft did not open source .NET. They just released the source code to public from Krish you will see the correction of this perception.  However, openness and transparency is a good thing, so I don't see this as bad.

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

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 source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally).  We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

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In the screen-shot above, you can see that we've set a debugger breakpoint in my page where we are calling GridView1.DataBind().  Previously there was no way to drill into this DataBind() method to see how it was implemented. 

Now with VS 2008 you'll be able to press F11 ("Step Into") and drill into the .NET Framework source implementation with the debugger:

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries - ScottGu's Blog

ttfn

David