Open Source .NET?
I just read that Microsoft intents to release most of the .NET Framework as open source. The complete text of the article can be found at the link below. This would be fantastic! It would also make my .NET debugger project Clutch almost worthless. One of the big goals I had for Clutch was to be able to debug IL, or at least a decompiled representation of IL. The intention was to allow debugging of not only personal code but also the ability to drill right into the base class libraries and windows forms code. Microsoft’s announcement makes it sound like they’ll also be shipping .PDB files with debugging information and symbols. While this is great news, it also means that I’m officially shelving my Clutch project for the time being.
Resources:
Update [11/5/2007]: As it was pointed out to me, Microsoft will not be looking for community contributions and so the term “open source” is a bit misleading. At this point they only intend to make the source code available for viewing and debugging purposes and all future development will still be handled by Microsoft.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I don’t think it’s open-sourced. Users cannot contribute to the code base. MS is making the source available to help understanding and debugging only.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
You are correct and the verbiage I used is a little misleading. It’s what Microsoft terms “Shared Source” meaning that the code is freely available, but as you said, it is not a community effort.
Cheers,
Jacob