Microsoft Reveals Developer Tools Source Code

I'm always shocked at the idea that people are mistrustful of additional features on newer versions of software. They have the option of either selling this as an add-on to VS 2005 (and then where does it stop), integrating it into VS 2008 since that's what they're working on anyways, or giving the features away free with VS 2005, loosing money and possibly introducing bugs into software that wasn't designed to do it.

Who cares if this is a marketing ploy? It's a good thing.

"We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within Visual Studio 2008."

Ahh... I missed that point. Stepping into their code would indeed make this useful.

On the other hand, I'm left wondering if this is a marketing ploy to get developers to upgrade to VS 2008. Will integrated debugging work in older Visual Studio versions? I'm loathe to trade a known set of VS bugs (with workarounds) for a brand-spankin' new set of bugs with Visual Studio 2008.

"We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within Visual Studio 2008."

Ahh... I missed that point. Stepping into their code would indeed make this useful.

On the other hand, I'm left wondering if this is a marketing ploy to get developers to upgrade to VS 2008. Will integrated debugging work in older Visual Studio versions? I'm loathe to trade a known set of VS bugs (with workarounds) for a brand-spankin' new set of bugs with Visual Studio 2008.

This is incredibly good news. As a .net developer there have been lots of times where I've wanted to step into framework code and see what the hell is going on. It helps to be able to track down where behavior is coming from _and_ helps you determine what can be done to get around said behavior.

Additionally while Reflector will give you the source code, it won't integrate with debugging which means you kind of have to ALT-Tab back and forth a ton of times as you try and understand what the hell is going on.

The way I understand it is that you want to see the source code of the functions/objects you use to debug your own code. Sometimes, the black-box functions one calls seem not to do their job. In 99.9% of the cases, the problem is in the caller function (ie, your own), but you may have trouble seeing this. So, by looking at the codes of the functions you call, you may finally get what's wrong with your own code.

Actually, if you read the blog post of the .Net team announcement, they refer to this scenario in particular.

So, if anything, the fact that MS follows others in making the code visible shows that there is a problem in the theory of object oriented and modular code that recommend to hide the inner workings of the code you depend on. However, showing everything is known to backfire, as people start writing code under certain assumptions about the code in these functions, which are not guaranteed to still be true in the next update of the library.

When it comes to Windows, you have to remember that there are a lot of programmers (millions) that are, how to say it, not that good. This is much less true in the Linux world. So, if you give any sharp object to them, they end up causing trouble pretty soon.