.NET is a platform independent framework. The major advantage that any .Net developer can avail is the MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language). Any .NET source code will be converted to MSIL. These are CPU independent instructions. The .NET assemblies contain MSIL as well as the metadata about it. At runtime, these MSIL instructions get converted to the CPU dependent code by JIT (Just in time). Every .NET developer knows the advantages of this architecture, but the disadvantage is that the MSIL and metadata in the assembly provide enough information to recover the original source code. Developers used to spend years making good bug free applications and it is obvious that they really do not want to make their work public.