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I am interested to learn more about how the .NET framework works internally. I have downloaded Reflector and also SSCLI. The following link says: "The Shared Source CLI is a compressed archive of the source code to a working implementation of the ECMA CLI and the ECMA C# language specification": http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=4917.

Does the SSCLI not include the source code for the implementation of VB.NET i.e. only C sharp?

I realise that the VB.NET specification can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15751

w0051977
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The SSCLI distribution was intended to help anybody to port a compliant implementation of the CLR to another platform. Most of it is C++ source code, the language used to implement the CLR, just-in-time compiler and the C# and JScript compilers. The .NET framework libraries were written in C#, that's included as well. They are a pretty decent snapshot of the source code used in .NET 2.0, albeit that it is hard to tell what might have been removed or substituted. I've never run into an obvious mismatch, but it gets less and less obvious with this source code aging and departing more and more from current .NET releases.

But no, there is no VB.NET compiler included, nor the source code for the classes in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. Nor is there a C++/CLI compiler. The included C# and JScript compilers are also not a complete implementation of the Microsoft version of those compilers, the Windows and VS specific bits were removed. Particularly the C# compiler source code is dated, a lot of work was done on it since.

Hans Passant
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