Gnoso

Scott Guthrie, a General Manager in the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft announced today that the .NET framework source code will now be published openly. It’s a great move by Microsoft. I have to say in general that I think the .NET development platform is one of the best technical products Microsoft has released in the past 10 years. SQL Server is the only product that may be close competition.

Opening the framework source code is a huge win for developers and is a no-brainer for Microsoft in my opinion. Developers already use tools like Reflector to decompile the IL code for the .NET framework and figure out what it’s doing. So, the contents of the code are not all that secret anyway. The boost for developers though is that they can debug problems in their own code better when they understand the expectations of the framework. The .NET framework libraries are well documented in general, but even so, I’ve found myself decompiling parts of the framework to solve tricky debugging problems.

It’s also not without precedent. In the past, Microsoft included the source code for MFC and ATL. I’m not sure that programmers would have accepted those frameworks as well as they did if Microsoft had not been open with the code.

Way to go Microsoft and Scott! This is a win for .NET developers all over.

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