Cast your .Net wide : The opening up the framework source

I work with the .NET framework to some degree every day of my life (and if you surf the web every day, then in all likelyhood so do you!)

Scott Guthrie and the rest of the Microsofties have decided to 'open' up the source of the .NET framework so developers can debug based on the source.

I don't think RMS or any of the open source Nazis are going to be building statues to Guthrie and his team outside the Free Software foundation headquarters over this, but it makes an interesting counter point to the whole OSS view point of the world.

The .NET framework is an amazing platform any way you cut it; love it or hate it, if you need to pick a random developer off the street and have him or her deliver your organisation cogent and readable code in large scale corporate product, .NET is where its at.

By opening up the Framework, everyone can get a better understanding of how the Framework really drives, and also enabled developers to better the leverage their applications against the Framework. For those who just want to drag and drop controls and tie them up on the backend this release will mean little, but for those of us trying to squeeze every drop out of our applications this is a VERY welcome submission to the community of .NET houses out there.

Is this the beginning of a broad opening up of Microsoft technologies? I doubt it, and this is a good thing. When ever I look at Microsoft I see a bewilderingly broad range of product and service areas; do I really want to bombarded with the Zune firmware? No, I don't. Sure some people might like to see it, but this is a good example of something niche which would waste Microsoft's resources in supporting.

The framework is central to the development of software on Microsoft's platform, and therefore a greater understanding of it should allow for us all to write better code, and therefore deliver better applications.

I'm also interested to see the coding and commenting practices present in the .NET framework. In the same way Hungarian notation influenced coders in the late 80s and early 90s, I hope to see a broad sweeping adoption of GOOD practices where present in the .NET code base.

I've already found a good example, namely the /* */ commenting of hard booleans into the actual function calls from within a class; I've never thought of this, and it really makes sense.

For example:

callFunction(/* Is the Connection open?*/ false, /*return a bool?*/ true);

which makes more sense than:

callFunction(false,true);

Overall, I am excited to take a look at the source, and get a better understanding of ADO.NET and ASP.NET;