Installing the .NET reference source code (RSCC)

Question

I've been trying for the last hour or so to get the downloadable .NET source code installed to my local machine and it appears to be broken.

I'm installing the .NET v8.0 file from here and after the install the following files are created:

-Readme.txt
-(Source)
--(DotNET)
---(8.0)
----source.zip.tmp
-(Symbols)
--pingme.txt
--(000Admin)
---0000000001
---history.txt
---lastid.txt
---server.txt

I can't imagine that this is right - is it? I would have thought there would be some pdb files at least... It certainly doesn't seem to work.

A little research pulled up this link where the guy says that it is something to do with the date formatting. I don't really want to rewrite the installer like he did, but I have tried setting my region to English-US (from UK) and customising the date format all with no success. If this was the issue I would have expected to find more references to it.

So, my questions are:

• Is the file structure above correct?
• If not, and you've successfully installed the file what are your system's culture settings?

Bonus question:

• Any idea specifically what the differences are between the files available from the RSCC? I can't find any documentation to tell me which are worth installing.

For reference I'm running Visual Studio 2008 on XP with all service packs and patches applied.

Answer 1

It seems like there are two setups, one to download all the files and another to get them on demand. When I tried this I used the netmassdownloader project on code project, which got all the pdb files for me but it still doesn't seem to step into the code.

Edit: The file source.zip.tmp is 140 mb and it seems like it should have been unpacked by the setup. Someone has written about this here.

5/6/2014 - This is a bit of an old answer now so just to note Microsoft have a new website for browsing the reference source here. Apparently the old method used to break when update/patches were installed, this has been solved however I'm not sure if this is a completely offline solution.