I hope Microsoft doesn't bundle the licence agreement for access to the
source code with the licence agreement for any other products like Visual
Studio 2008 or others. If they do, they can sue customers who have viewed the
source code for having done so and taken ideas from it. I wouldn't want to
view the source code for such a price. And for that reason, I wouldn't want
to be in a situation where if I had agreed to the licence agreement for, say,
VS2008, I would, by default, be also agreeing to the licence agreement for
the source code.
I think I see a future where I'll be doing all my .NET development with
Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 if Microsoft should follow such a
path.
I actually loved .NET. Java is so slow doing everything. I haven't bothered
to learn Ruby or Python. I can't stand Linux for being so programmer
unfriendly. And I had left C++ behind for a long time.
I thought Microsoft was a company for software developers. I have been using
their technologies for over 13 years. Now, I think my programming days are
almost over. Unless I learn Ruby or Python, which are not that mainstream.
Nevertheless, I hope I can implement my ideas using them since I love coding
and it's all I want to do.
JJ
"Peter Duniho" wrote:
Jon Skeet [C# MVP] wrote:
I'm sure the net will be buzzing with this news fairly soon, but just
in case anyone hasn't seen it yet:
Microsoft are going to make the source code for the .NET framework
(parts of it, including the BCL, ASP.NET and LINQ) available both for
viewing and debugging into.
[...]
Any comments?
You mean other than it seems that Microsoft is taking some of the best
ideas from the open-source movement?
First they release a free development environment that has very few
really important features missing, and now they are offering the actual
source code for .NET?
As if that weren't great enough, an even cooler part is that the source
will be copied on-demand according to the framework version you're
actually using.
The one major downside I see is the potential for finding .NET
applications where the author took the original .NET code and used that
to create their own custom version of some .NET class, negating one of
the primary benefits of using a framework: using the same well-tested,
broadly-deployed component that everyone else is using.
But I'm guessing that the people who are likely to do that would
probably find other ways to write bad code anyway. :)
I guess the one thing missing from this announcement is how this all
relates to a project like Mono. It would be pretty awesome if Microsoft
would allow the source code to be used for cross-platform
implementations of .NET, and could dramatically decrease the lag of
non-Windows .NET implementations behind the Windows releases.
Pete