Have you ever wanted to take a look at the internals of the .NET Framework? Sure you can (and should) fire up Reflector and see the Base Class Libraries, but what about the fully commented source code? What about the parts implemented in C++?

A while back, Microsoft released the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (aka the SSCLI aka Rotor). This is a fully working implementation of the ECMA CLI standard and ECMA C# language specification. So it’s not quite the entire framework, but it is still quite a bit of code.

Traditionally, to look at this code you would download the compressed archive and play around with it locally.

Development-CostBut if you want to just quickly browse the code, you can view all of its nearly three million lines of code on its project page on Koders.com.

Wouldn’t it be fun to compare that development cost estimate with the real number? I doubt Microsoft is interested in disclosing that information.

To search within this project, you just need to set the search scope.

For example, here are the search results for DateTime and here is the page with the DateTime implementation complete with comments.

Koders - datetime.cs - Windows Internet Explorer

Other Great Projects to Look At

I mentioned a couple of great projects to look at over on the Koders blog, but here are some other great projects of interest to me now included in the Source Code Index.

  • DotNetNuke
    • One of the largest open source projects on the .NET Framework.
  • Subsonic
    • Some think this project should be called Sublime for how it brings fun back to ASP.NET development.
  • Subtext
    • Of course I’m going to mention this!
  • PSP Development Tools
    • Because we all want to write the next great game for the Play Station Portable.