Microsoft officials are continuing to ponder what technologies the company should make more broadly available and how best to do so.

And, in an interesting twist, at least in one case, they are using blogs to debate the details.

This past weekend, Shawn Burke, a Microsoft developer division program manager posted to his blog his thinking about making the Windows Forms source code available to developers.

Windows Forms is a set of .Net Framework classes. It is a key element of Microsoft's "smart client" strategy. Smart clients are applications which combine the best of Web applications with the best of Windows applications, in Microsoft parlance.

Industry watchers have been speculating on which Microsoft technologies the company is likely to release next under either its Shared Source licensing mechanism – or via a true open-source license, such as the Common Public License (CPL). Last year, the company released its Windows Installer (WiX), Windows template-library components and its FlexWiki source code under the CPL.

Burke said in an open note to developers on his blog "I want to deliver Windows Forms soruce code to you. I've wanted to do it for years and I'm putting together a plan to make it happen."

Burke acknowledged there are a few potential stumbling blocks that could interfere with making the WinForms source more widely available.

First is the issue of intellectual property. But Burke dismissed this concern in his blog posting, claiming he is "comfortable with what's in Windows Forms." He added: "And let's be honest here, there have been tools around for years that basically are exposing this anyway."

Burke also raised the issue of cost, noting that the developer division team is consumed by getting the Visual Studio 2005 product out the door. And releasing code under a program like Shared Source requires quite a bit of management and maintenance.

"So I have to make this happen on the cheap," Burke noted.

Thirdly, the WinForms source — like all Microsoft source code — is loaded with comments that developers wrote into the product when creating it. And code comments typically include lots of four-letter words, politically incorrect references and disparaging comments about competitors, if not customers.

"In order for us to ship the code we need to 'scrub' the comments and make sure there is nothing bad in there. No swear words, no bad jokes on the part of developers, no references to specific customers, no geo-political faux pas. And with well over half a million lines of code, there is just no way we'll be able to get this done. Plus you'll need to do it with each new release, etc. It's a ton of work (and don't bother debating the necessity of all of this, trust me, it is what it is)."

Burke asked for feedback from readers on what Microsoft should do, in terms of making the WinForms source release doable. As of the time this article was published, nearly 90 individuals had posted feedback on his blog.

When asked about Microsoft's plans to open up access to WinForms, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft's developer division, said it was too early to determine what Microsoft will do. He said there is no imminent decision on when, how or if Microsoft will make the WinForms source available.

"If we want to give open-source access to people, they get excited about that," Somasegar said. "But the issue is if we make (the code) available to everybody, how should we take feedback from people? And how do we maintain the reliability and security requirements people have?"