Debugging into the .NET Library Source

I was hesitant to add any preview plug-ins or apply any patches to Visual Studio 2008 until I’d finished my review, but now that it’s done I’ve gone a little wild. I have installed the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, the ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools Dec 07 Preview, the Silverlight Tools, Volta, and the patches needed for the EF Tools and for debugging into the .NET Library source code.

The instructions for enabling Visual Studio 2008 to debug into the .NET Library source code are on Shawn Burke’s blog. The only part that gave me any trouble was installing the Hotfix, and even that didn’t take long.

The EULA that comes up the first time you try to view Library source code is a little more specific than what was originally announced: it does not give you a license to view the source if you’re building a competing product for a non-Microsoft OS. That addresses the “patent troll” issue that Dave Rosenberg raised last October, and which I discussed at the time.

It’s worth understanding which assemblies are currently available for symbol/source loading. Shawn lists them in his blog entry:

• Mscorlib.DLL
• System.DLL
• System.Data.DLL
• System.Drawing.DLL
• System.Web.DLL
• System.Web.Extensions.DLL
• System.Windows.Forms.DLL
• System.XML.DLL
• WPF (UIAutomation*.dll, System.Windows.DLL, System.Printing.DLL, System.Speech.DLL, WindowsBase.DLL, WindowsFormsIntegration.DLL, Presentation*.dll, some others)
• Microsoft.VisualBasic.DLL

More assemblies will be added in the future.

There’s a new MSDN forum to discuss the Reference Source Server. There are already 27 questions, but I’m sorry to say that many of them are just rehashes of FAQs that were already answered in Shawn’s blog.