Following on the announcement last summer that we would be making the
source code to an implementation of the ECMA CLI and C# standards
available, Microsoft today made available the first beta-quality, source
code drop to its shared source implementation of the ECMA CLI and C#
standards. 

This source implementation (code named "Rotor") builds and runs on both
Windows XP as well as the FreeBSD Unix Operating System.  It is a 11Mb
download, and contains approximately 1.3 Million lines of code.

The first source drop is not feature complete, but it should provide a
good indication of the progress Microsoft is making with this
implementation.  It can be downloaded from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli.

In the source code, you will find compilers, tools, techniques for
automatically managing memory, just-in-time (JIT) code generators,
component infrastructure, globalization know-how, security protocols,
and all sorts of other intriguing realizations of abstract concepts.  In
addition to reading the code, you can tinker, modify it, and recompile
it yourselves.

Microsoft has built the Shared Source CLI so that researchers, students,
professors and other interested developers can teach, learn, and
experiment with advanced computer language infrastructure. To achieve
this goal, the source code to both the Windows XP and FreeBSD versions
of the software has been released using the shared source approach to
source code access. The license for the Shared Source CLI Implementation
permits anyone to use or modify its code for non-commercial purposes.

Note that O'Reilly has also published a book about the release.  You can
learn read more about it at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sscliess/

More information can also be learned from the MSDN article at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=3D/library/en-us/Dndotn
e
t/html/mssharsourcecli.asp

Enjoy,

Scott