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I'm not typically a Microsoft basher but this isn't a big deal. The .NET source code has always been available via Reflection. Download Lutz Roeder's Reflector, disassemble one of the classes shown in the blog post and compare the disassembled code with the screenshots. Having access to the set of debugging symbols and code commentary is obviously a good thing however.

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I think this is a big deal for two reasons: it signals that Microsoft is starting to open up a little and the other reason is that getting code definition information through an IDE like Visual Studio is vastly superior to disassembling a .NET framework dll and inspecting the code.

No it's not. Reading CIL code in the Reflector is often better than reading it in Visual Studio: the Reflector is an amazing little tool with one of the best integrated cross-referencers I've used.

I'm guessing you've never actually used it, because you're using the word "disassemble" to describe it. Like JVM bytecode, CIL is unambiguous, explicitly typed, and doesn't rely on aliasing; therefore, like JVM bytecode, it is easily reversed back out to a high level language. You're not reading CIL opcodes in the Reflector, you're reading C#.

I wonder if this is a valuable lesson for developers here. Bytecode VMs do not offer strong protection of your source code.

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