ASP.NET Web Matrix was the Free ASP.NET editor back in the .NET 1.x days. The tool is actually still available for download. The other day, I was thinking...

Why doesn't Microsoft make ASP.NET Web Matrix available as Shared Source?

Web Matrix was a really cool tool, and it's obviously been rendered obsolete by Visual Studio Express. However, there are still alot of really cool things done in the code, and I think it would be beneficial to the community if the source code were made available.

So, I decided to email Scott Guthrie (I only chose him because I have no idea who else might have the correct authority to possibly make this happen.) the basic description and question stated above.

Within a day I got the following response from ScottGu:

That is a good question. I will send some mail to the team to inquire whether we could make this happen.

Thanks,

Scott

Now, we can all wait and see if it'll happen. Hopefully there isn't too much "secret" proprietary code within Web Matrix that prevents Microsoft from releasing it under a Shared Source license.