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Microsoft Releases Source of .NET Base Classes

Posted by Soulskill on from the yes-there-is-a-catch dept.

Disgruntled Fungus writes "A few months ago, we discussed Microsoft's intention to open source the .NET libraries. According to a developer's official blog, the source code is now available. The source to libraries such as System, IO, Windows.Forms, etc. can now be viewed and used for debugging purposes from within Visual Studio. Instructions for doing so have also been provided. The source code has been released with a read-only license and 'does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework.'"

4 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:you know what *that* sounds like.. by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Informative

    They could already have done this if they wanted to though.

    (see also Lutz Roeder's popular .NET Reflector software)

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  2. Reflector by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course, anyone doing serious development with .NET has been looking at the source for years now in any case by using Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector, which is a C# (etc) decompiler (not just a disassembler). It's the only way to reliably discover and work around the horrible bugs and misdesigns in MS's libraries. (Yes, WSE, I'm looking at you.)

    Reflector is downloadable from http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/. And it's obfuscated, so it won't run usefully on itself :-)

  3. Looks rather clunky by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 4, Informative
    Has anyone looked at the instructions for using these sources in Visual Studio? It seems monstrously crippled compared to debugging third party sources in Eclipse.

      * Each source file you debug into is dynamically downloaded once for each session and not retained.
      * Setting breakpoints in the source is a multi-step process, because the source is different from the corresponding symbol files because the copyright banners they insert change the CRC. You have to tell the IDE to ignore that.
      * You have to manually tell it to load symbols for each file.
      * The symbols are also served up from an MS server (but they are cached beyond a single session).
          * Some of these symbol files are 10MB, so VS "may be unresponsive" while you download them.
      * "Go to Definition" doesn't work.

    This in contrast to the same support in Eclipse, where all you have to do is
      * Download the source
      * Tell the IDE where to find the source

    14) Can I point a web browser at the symbols URL and download the symbols directly?

    No, you'll get an HTTP 400 (Bad Request) response. So in addition, you'll need a professional version of Visual Studio, because the Express versions don't support the Source Server feature.

    Given that it all seems so inconvenient to use, I think I may be sticking to Reflector.
  4. it's not open source by nguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft is not releasing those libraries as open source. What they are doing is what they and other companies have been doing for a long time: releasing some of their source code in read-only form to "help" people debug.

    In fact, the real problem with this is that, in case of ambiguities, people will code increasingly to Microsoft's source code instead of the specification. Furthermore, after having released it, Microsoft may attempt to claim that the Mono project copied some of their source code in violation of the license.

    One can't prevent Microsoft from doing this, but it's not a good thing.