Via ScottGu.

I think this is a really positive step forward. For the longest time, I've thought that it's more difficult to work with .NET than it needs to be because we don't have the ability to debug into the Framework and see how things are actually working.

There's a long history of Microsoft shipping out source code for framework libraries - things like the C runtime, the MFC, the ATL and I think it just made life a whole lot easier than having to try and guess why it is that some method is throwing an exception at you.

Ironically, just at the time of writing this code, I'm trying to figure out why the ADO.NET Entity Framework is throwing an exception at me  and I'm trying to do it with Reflector. It'd be a whole lot easier if I just had the source code and could step my debugger into it.

As far as I know there are plans to make the source code available via a public source server. If you've never looked at setting up symbol servers or source servers then I'd suggest that you look at it because VS has great support for this stuff. I made a video about working with symbols;

Working with symbol files

and I thought I'd made one about source servers as well but can't locate it at the time of writing.

Now, it's not all of the .NET Framework that's being made available but it looks to be a significant portion of it and you'd have to hope that more will become available over time.

Very, very cool stuff - genuinely very pleased to see it :-)