Closed-Source? There's An App For That

I recently read an article on Gamasutra about developing on closed-source frameworks.  The author posts some interesting pieces on the site and I like to follow him, but this write up rankled me a bit.  He suggests some good reasons for why you should only build on open-source platforms.

I like working with .NET.  It streamlines details of what is going on under the hood so that I don't have to worry about as much.  Maybe the article annoyed because I agree with his principles while I ignore them in favor of not having to dig deeply into the underpinnings of popular .NET frameworks.  Why poke around in the guts of XNA when it lets me get started on a game idea quickly?  Who cares how WCF works its magic when it allows me to ease the pain of bringing a handful of standard web technologies together in my distributed applications?

While there are real benefits to using a framework out of the box, I think a deeper understanding of the frameworks we take for granted in .NET is a good thing.  Sometimes you want to open the hood and see what's going on.  I did a bit of that with Resharper before it became a commercial enterprise, but I've been lazy lately.  There's really no excuse for that when there are some easy to use open source alternatives such as ILSpy and the upcoming dotPeek.

I've started using ILSpy and it's a nice simple tool.  Download the binaries and run the exe to start decompiling.  Enjoy turning over the rocks :)

Decompiling a C# type in ILSpy