microsoft/referencesource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3444 stars · 1301 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A read-only mirror of the Microsoft .NET Framework Reference Source, containing source code for a subset of the .NET Framework class libraries. It is published under MIT for community reference and consulted during .NET Core development.

Use cases

• browse the source code of .NET Framework class libraries
• understand how BCL types like System.Data or System.Core are implemented
• consult original .NET Framework sources when developing .NET Core
• look up reference implementations of .NET APIs
• study Microsoft's C# class library code for learning

When to choose

• you need to read the actual implementation of .NET Framework library code
• you're porting or comparing .NET Framework behavior to .NET Core
• you want MIT-licensed reference sources for study or tooling

When to avoid

• you need actively maintained .NET libraries - use dotnet/runtime instead
• you want to file bugs or request features - this repo is read-only
• you need a runnable NuGet package rather than source code

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

developer-tools documentation programming-languages developer-tools documentation dotnet windows cross-platform dotnet-framework reference-source read-only microsoft csharp class-library-source

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="microsoft/referencesource")