Scott Guthrie has a blog post entitled Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries where he writes

One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).  We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ).  The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

This is one of those announcements I find hard to get excited about. Any developer who’s been frustrated by the weird behavior of a .NET Framework class and has wanted to look at it’s code, should already know about Lutz Roeder’s Reflector which is well known in the .NET devoper community. So I’m not sure who this anouncement is actually intended to benefit.

On the other hand, I’m sure Java developers are having a chuckle at our expense that it took this long for Microsoft to allow developers to see the source code for ArrayList.Count so we can determine if it is lazily or eagerly evaluated.

Oh well, better late than never.

PS: The ability to debug into .NET Framework classes will be nice. I’ve wanted this more than once while working on RSS Bandit and will definitely take advantage of it if I ever get around to installing VS 2008.

Now playing: TLC - Somethin Wicked This Way Comes (feat. Andre 3000)