One of the things I always loved about working with Delphi was the fact that the entire VCL framework’s source code was shipped with the product. Being able to look at and debug into the existing framework code is an invaluable tool for both learning how things are done as well as debugging tricky issues.
Today Microsoft announced that they’ll be doing the same for the .NET 3.5 framework in the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 release which is awesome news. Scott Guthrie has the deets.
While you’ve always been able to use a tool like Lutz Roeder’s Reflector to get an approximation of the source code there are always little nuisances that get lost in the CodeDOM translation. Reading source code is really a great way to learn a language and I’ve often found other’s code inspiring me to write better.
This is yet more good news for what’s shaping up to be a pretty solid release with Visual Studio 2008. I’ve been using the beta for awhile now and find it hard to go to back 2005 for the few times I have to.