Windows 10: Bill Gates Releases Microsoft's Original Source Code

Perhaps in honor of Microsoft's 50th anniversary, Bill Gates has released the company's original source code. "That code remains the coolest code I've ever written ..." he says. You can see it on his blog.

:)

 

Bill Gates Retires From Microsoft

The founder and head of Microsoft, the world's largest software company Bill Gates steps down on Friday. One of the richest men in the world, Gates will now work full time for his charitable organization The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The 52-year-old will continue to be chairman though, but will only retain a nominal role in the software empire. He is still is the biggest shareholder of the company and his 8.7 per cent stake in Microsoft is worth about 23 billion dollars.

Gates authored the personal computer revolution three decades ago when he founded Microsoft along with his friend Paul Allen.

Microsoft released a commemorative video paying tribute to Bill's service to the company, titled "Bill Gates: Looking back, Moving Ahead". It can be watched on the company's website here.

 

Microsoft Releases .NET Source Code

Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET has always been an industry leader in providing a programming and debugging environment for numerous languages including Visual C++, C++/#, J/J#, Visual Basic, and many more. However, despite the general good sentiment about the product, Microsoft was often criticized for not revealing the source code to its libraries. Now Microsoft is taking steps towards open sourcing its code and finally is letting developers peek under the hood as it releases the source code to various .NET component libraries. The initial release will contain source code 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). Later Microsoft will release the source code for other remaining libraries as well, including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ. The move is detailed on the blog of Scott Gu, a Microsoft employee.

Source: DailyTech

 

Microsoft Releases .NET Source Code

To correct the original post: the Microsoft blogger's name is Scott Guthrie, ScottGu is his username *Wink .

Emphasis added by me. Scott Guthrie's blog post does not mention the term "open source" anywhere, merely that the source will be released; there is no mention as yet of the license it will be released under, but I imagine it will be fairly restrictive.

Additionally, I don't see why this is such a major thing... Reflector has been around since .NET 1.1 and allows you to view the source code of any assembly by decompiling the MSIL back to your preferred language (C#, VB.NET, etc.). Not only that, there are plugins that can then dump the decompiled source to disk - so if you really need to debug a third-party assembly, there's nothing stopping you. (Obviously this doesn't hold true for assemblies placed in the GAC or those with Strong Names.)

The real benefit of this release, IMO, will be the ability to step through the actual MS source code, as well as being able to see the comments written by MS developers. This should really improve my productivity as a .NET dev *Smile .