When .NET first came on the scene, there was fighting over whether it was a platform or not. As I have said here in the past, those debates are over as .NET has proven itself a very useful and valuable platform, expanding into areas that people assumed it wouldn't and even couldn't in the early days.

Now I am starting to see it expand beyond what we used to think of as just a development platform. Things like XNA for game development and the many third-party products that have extended the ecosystem again and again. That might have been expected by those who saw many open positions to be filled; recently, however, Scott Guthrie really opened the flood gates. He announced that Microsoft is releasing the source code for the .NET Framework Libraries and integrating the debugging support into the upcoming release of Visual Studio, which has been code-named Orcas. This is huge because now developers can figure things out themselves that up until now were most likely only possible if you were up for doing a stint as a developer in Redmond!
When .NET first came out, our developers ended up having to learn IL so they could figure out what was going on and try to replicate cool features. This was vital because there were no books, no experts outside Microsoft who could explain how things worked and why. Now good developers can figure it out themselves and the black box has turned clear. There will be a phased approach to the release, but based on Scott's blog post on www.ScottGu.com, the code will certainly come faster than anyone has the ability to ingest it. I think this is the beginning of a new acceleration as the .NET "Platform" morphs into something more, something bigger. The next version of Visual Studio has lots of cool features including Linq, which we have an article on in this very issue; however, ultimately even if there are no new killer features in Visual Studio 2008 (the official name for Orcas) that are tempting you, the ability to step through the base classes and other libraries will certainly make it a runaway success. Happy debugging ;)