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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

what? is .NET open source ? if it's open source is it a free software ?

.net is "Source Available" perhaps, Microsoft makes the source available so that you can step into their code when debugging. They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.

If you prefer to browse the source http://referencesource.microsoft.com/ has it all including the license. It appears to be a non free license as it is for reference use only.

>They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.

Is this something that happens automatically? Do you have any more information how to set this up?

On http://referencesource.microsoft.com in bold "How to configure Visual Studio for debugging .NET framework" which links to http://referencesource.microsoft.com/setup.html

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319037/en-us

You can read more here

http://www.asp.net/open-source

Well , i'm not concerned about Asp.NET but .NET itself.So this page is not going to answer my question.

Ah, an important distinction, my mistake.

asp.net is, the .NET framework not but there are some open source implementations based on the standard specification. Like Mono and DotGnu

DotGnu has been dead for nearly half a decade.

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