Many years ago in late 2002, I spent quite a few hours playing around with Rotor, the Shared Source CLI implementation.

Back then Rotor was the easiest way to get a peek at how the .NET runtime and supporting libraries might have been implemented. Not everything was there, and that which was there wasn't guaranteed to function in exactly the same was as the shipping CLR, but it let you look at the C# and C++ source code that made things happen.

I played around with the Gyro patch half-heartedly, but by the time the v2 release of SSCLI came out, my thirst was adequately quenched by Reflector so I never really got into the genericised version.

I didn't read Stutz, Neward and Shilling's Shared Source CLI Essentials book (sorry guys!) but it did sit on my wishlist for a while.

Now Ted Neward and Joel Pobar are self-publishing the sequel to the book, and will be giving away the electronic version of it through the Microsoft site.

I have had a brief skim through the draft, and it's a CLR geeks heaven. I'm looking forward to curling up with it some time in the near future.

Check it out: Shared Source CLI 2.0

I believe Joel is at TechEd Australia next month - make sure to go along to his F# talk if you're there.