I just read Scott Guthrie’s announcement that, starting with Visual Studio 2008, the full, commented source code to the major assemblies in the .NET framework will be available for debugging and analysis, both as a source tarball and on-demand via the public symbol server.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been using a System assembly which is misbehaving, and been forced to use Lutz Roeder’s Reflector tool to reverse-engineer to uncommented C# code in the hopes of figuring out that is wrong. It was equivalent to the days of old when the C Runtime Library source code wasn’t shipped with the compiler.

All I can say is, “what took so long!?”

UPDATE I’ve read some bitching about the nature of the license under which this code is to be released; specifically, some Microsoft license which is no-modify and no-distribute. Those who find this unacceptable are, imho, missing the point. 80% of the value of a unrestricted GPL-type .NET Framework source release would be easier diagnosis and debugging anyway, since even if you could fork the MS framework, that would be like modifying the MFC code that shipped with VC 4 and shipping the modified DLLs with your product; you could do it, but you’d have to be a fucking moron.