CodePlex celebrates its 2nd birthday!

It seems like only recently, but is has been two years since we launched CodePlex. We launched this in Summer 2006 as Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Our goal was, and continues to be, to provide developers with the ability to collaborate on open source projects using the tools they are most familiar with.

Since launching, CodePlex has grown steadily, recently achieving two major milestones: 1,000,000 unique visitors/month and 5,000 total projects. CodePlex projects appeal to many audiences and include the AJAX Control Toolkit, Rawr (a .NET tool for World of Warcraft), and IronPython.

To give you a glimpse into some of the technology behind the site, CodePlex is built on Team Foundation Server. Specifically, seven TFS servers run more than 5,600 projects and cater to 12,000 project developers and 120,000 code check-ins.

Open source developers can use the Visual Studio Team Explorer client for free with CodePlex to get the full integrated development experience. CodePlex also supports a wide range of other source control clients such as TortoiseSVN and TeamPrise to give users more flexibility and cross-platform access.

The key to CodePlex’s growth is the customer-focus of the CodePlex team. Decisions on new features are made directly from onsite customer voting and have resulted recently in features such as Project Stats, Code Syntax Highlighting, and Rating and Reviews, which launched last week.

 

To find out more about what is happening with CodePlex, check out the CodePlex team blog.

Namaste!