It’s taken a few years but Microsoft has announced that it will make the source code for the majority of its .NET framework libraries available for download with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 later this year.

Initially the release will include 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). Source code for more libraries such as WCF, Workflow, and LINQ will be added in later releases. The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL), which in a nutshell says “You can look at this, but don’t change anything”.

The full announcement from Scott Guthrie can be found on his blog here. From a developer’s point of view, this can only be good. Rather than relying on newsgroups for those buggy itches that can’t be scratched, developers should now be able to use the source code to trace exactly why their problems are occurring and make changes accordingly. Of course, by releasing the source code, the b0rg will open themselves up to criticism from some for their actual coding. Indeed, the first such comment from the ‘not my code, I could write better’ camp has already been posted based on the contents of the screenshots in Scott’s post.

As agilists and design pattern specialists ready their knives and posts for their release, it’s worth remembering that this is a huge step for Microsoft. Read only or not, for them to start opening up their code takes a lot of guts. Reactions from the open source world and podcasts are already appearing in reaction to the announcement.

And so Microsoft released Halo 3. And for at least 48 hours developers (being the geeks that most of us are) ‘were off sick’ and then came back to work to notice that the Borg had also released two other items to the wild.

It’s not with some ironic rolling of eyes and shrugging of the shoulders that after watching the whole summer’s online pressure on the Vista team to justify exactly where the extras were to make Vista Ultimate, well ‘ultimate’, they released DreamScene, possibly the world’s most underwhelming bit of software. It lets the wallpaper move like a screensaver, does it? Oh bravo. And exactly why is the build date on this v1.0 product mid-July? It was never really going to impinge on Silverlight and IronRuby at Mix 07 was it, so why the delay? At least it comes in x32 and x64 flavours. Oh wait, but it won’t run on any machine (like mine) that has two (cheap GeForce 8400GS) graphics cards in it? Exactly why or how did the scenario of DreamScene running on a two card machine (which I can’t help thinking the typical gamer-type owner target audience type person for Vista Ultimate is more likely to own than other demographics) get dismissed so easily? So I repeat: exactly which is the Ultimate bit of Vista Ultimate then?

That’ll be the stuff in the other release of the week: the first release candidate of WIndows Server 2008, the only possible replacement for the many thousands of development machines still running on XP and 2003 Server because Vista just doesn’t kick it. It’s clean, fast and it works on the premise that if you want a feature you’ll switch it on, rather than the other way round. And no signs that Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 won’t all make the official February launch date MS has set. By all account, we might even get Visual Studio for Christmas.

Who needs DreamScene anyway? No really…..

Jon Galloway writes The 9 things Microsoft SHOULD be announcing next week at MIX07 (but won’t). It’s now less than a day to the ‘big announcement’ at MIX ‘07 and I’d love for a couple of these to become true - I can’t see how Silverlight will be written for without an Express version of Blend for example and I’d never heard of Singularity before but want to know more now - but here’s what else I’d hope to hear.

1. Microsoft is now a 64-bit only company
   Some of you may already have surmised this from the fact that our release schedule implies this, but we have decided that all Microsoft releases from Windows Longhorn onwards shall be 64bit only. This includes Visual Studio, Microsoft Office and other desktop applications. All new, modern computers are being built with ever more powerful 64-bit processors in ever cheaper models and the 64-bit platform offers us ways to shore up our somewhat insecure OSs with patchguard and a fairly level playing field with the virus world. The successor to Vista will furthermore not include a 32-bit backwards compatibility layer in the same way that Windows XP expunged 16-bit apps. You’ll need to use Virtual PC for those, but as you’ll need a multi-core 4GB machine to run it, this shouldn’t be a problem.
2. We are rewriting Internet Explorer from scratch
   We’re not deaf. The only way for web development to go forward is to invest fully in web standards so that all browsers act in the same manner and for this to happen, we can’t use Internet Explorer. IE7 really will be the last version as it is so swamped with hacks and weirdness to ensure that it behaves in the same way as IE4, 5 & 6 as well as trying to behave better as IE7 that further development in that codebase is untenable. Our IE group manager being part of the HTML5 working group is the first step to proving this investment in web standards. Microsoft “Webslinger” is the second. This will be a completely standalone application that is not tied into the operating system (we learnt our lesson with that) and which will be available for free via Microsoft Update and as many coverdiscs as we can throw it onto. It will also be an open project Microsoft Endorsed Project. (see Jon’s idea #7)  Besides, if Netscape folks can do it and come up with Firefox, why can’t we do it in half the time and bring up something twice as good. (oh wait, don’t answer that).
3. XBox Blu-ray
   The PS3’s built-in Blu-ray drive has accelerated that disc format’s sales well past those of HD-DVD in just six weeks. To redress the balance we’re announcing that a new external Blu-ray drive and firmware update will become available in June.
4. Windows Vista, core edition.
   We’ve had such a good response about the core edition of Windows Longhorn, we thought we’d do the same for Windows Vista, offering a stripped down version of the system for those who want their apps to get the CPUs full attention rather than the spangly ClearText anti-aliasing or the system restore service. In this version, you start off with a Powershell command line and nothing more. You have to switch on everything you want running rather than switch it off. GUI, Indexing, network, 32bit compatibility etc.
5. Microsoft has hired the TiVo UI team
   TiVo is OK, but it’s on the way out. However, of all the PVR’s that exist on the market - including Media Centre - TiVo has by far and away the best user experience out of the box. We’re not ashamed to admit this and are happy to announce that part of the TiVo UI team is now happily ensconced in Redmond working on the next version of MCE.
6. Microsoft Live Search
   In addition to today’s full launch of Microsoft Live, we’ve decided that Google is getting too much of the limelight and are announcing Microsoft Live Applications Search. This is a pure dedicated search service server that you can integrate into your applications to take care of all your search requirements. To demonstrate the power of MLAS, we are proud to announce that myspace.com, which already runs on our .NET platform, switched live to MLAS after several months of trials and is already seeing benefits.
7. Steve Ballmer is leaving.

To reiterate, this is just a bit of speculation on my part ranging from the probable to the frankly insane given their past announcements, but it’s a bit more fun than everyone already knowing that Apple was going to announce the iPhone.