The ASP.NET MVC library’s source code has been made available on CodePlex, ScottGu announced today. The project itself is still very much a work in progress, but with this you should be able to get a much better idea of how everything is laid out and working. I think it’s great the Microsoft is being this transparent with their development efforts, and the amount of community feedback they are accepting and acting on with this project is outstanding. For a variety of legal reasons they are not accepting patches to the code directly, but that doesn’t mean that reproduced bugs and even blog entries noting changes you’d like to see will not be used to improve the product. And of course, you can fix the bug in your local copy and avoid having to wait for a fix from Microsoft.

Another thing that I like about this is that it shows (one way) how to build an MVC platform. There are of course other MVC implementations for ASP.NET already, but the one that most developers going forward will use (say, a year from now) will be the one coming out of Redmond, so I think this one is important. Anyway, the reason I care about this is that in addition to learning about MVC I’m also trying my best to become a Silverlight expert, and one thing that is clear about the default mode of building Silverlight applications is that it is an awful lot like web forms. I’m hoping someone (I doubt I’ll have time myself) takes the MVC source and ports the important parts of it over to a Silverlight implementation, for use in building full-blown applications in Silverlight. Anybody want to build Silverlight MVC?