Few months back I had blogged about this real amazing news from .NET Framework's team, plans to release Source Code of .NET Framework Libraries and enable debugging support of them in Visual Studio 2008. Well... the special day has arrived, Recently Scott announced Source Code of .Net Framework Libraries is now available for everyone.

Isn't this great news?! I'm pretty much excited to check it out.

Currently source code for the following .NET Framework libraries are available.

• .NET Base Class Libraries including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).
• ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
• ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

Scott has also mentioned that they'll be adding up more libraries in near future.

And now How do you configure Visual Studio to avail this feature?

Well.. Shawn Burke has blogged a brief post explaining "How to Configure Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code".

I'd recommend checking the following links for more details:

.Net framework library source code now available - ScottGu
Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code - Shawn Burke
.NET Framework Library Source Code available for viewing - Scott Hanselman 

Cheers!
Chirag

Recently Scott announced some really exciting news for .NET developers that his team has been working to enable the ability for .NET developers to browse and download source code of .NET Framework Libraries and also with debugging support.

This feature will be available with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, which is expected later this year.

Microsoft will begin with offering the source code for .NET Framework Libraries including:

• System
• System.IO
• System.Collections
• System.Configuration
• System.Threading
• System.Net
• System.Security
• System.Runtime
• System.Text
• ASP.NET (System.Web)
• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
• ADO.NET (System.Data)
• XML (System.Xml)
• WPF (System.Windows)

How it Works?

In Scott's blog you'll find all the details and screens on "How it works", but it's  as easy and simple like you were debugging and browsing the source code locally - step through, set breakpoints, inspect variables, etc.

Here are few links to know more about this feature.

• Making .NET Framework source available to developers
• Channel 9 Video, more details on Reference Source
• Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries
• Hanselminutes Podcast 83 - Microsoft to release .NET Framework Libraries Source

I'm really excited and just can't wait to get my hand on it. (:-P)

A day back Microsoft announced Silverlight 1.0 final release for Mac and Windows. A cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web.

Some of its features include:

• Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser.  The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience - since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser.  It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified).  It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware. 

• Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server.  You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser.  No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux).  Microsoft will also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.

• Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming.  This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server).  Streaming brings some significant benefits in that: 1) it can improve the end-user's experience when they seek around in a large video stream, and 2) it can dramatically lower your bandwidth costs. 

• Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences.  It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these.  One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together). 

• Silverlight makes it easy to build rich video player interactive experiences.  You can blend together its media capabilities with the vector graphic support to create any type of media playing experience you want.  Silverlight includes the ability to "go full screen" to create a completely immersive experience, as well as to overlay menus/content/controls/text directly on top of running video content (allowing you to enable DVD like experiences).  Silverlight also provides the ability to resize running video on the fly without requiring the video stream to be stopped or restarted.

Silverlight for Linux

Microsoft also announced Silverlight support on Linux and its partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux.  Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".