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.

Today I’m trying to track down an elusive bug that only presents at a single customer site. We’ve narrowed it to something having to do with VSS, so now I need to force some VSS snapshots outside of our product. As it happens, the VSS SDK comes with just such a tool: vshadow. vshadow seems to have options to exercise just about every facet of the complex VSS API, which makes it a handy test probe. Just one problem; the version that ships with the VSS SDK is for Visual C++ 2005, and won’t build when put through VS 2k5.