CodePlex Weblog

Join the CodePlex community on Geeklist

Mark_Groves — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:15:00 GMT

Community is very important to us at CodePlex. And we love partnering with other like-minded organizations. Geeklist is one of the new kids on the block, building a great place for geeks to share what they've done, who they did it with and connect with great companies and communities.

There are some exciting new experiences coming on-line soon that you won’t want to miss out on. Geeklist is currently in private beta, so if you don't already have an account, use the CodePlex invite code to create your own account. Then, join the CodePlex community and follow the CodePlex team on Geeklist.

Once you’ve joined, be proud, tell the world what you have worked on, and who you did it with. And don’t be shy to give out a few high fives to the amazing work others in the community have created.

Release Notes for 5/31/2012

jontsao — Thu, 31 May 2012 23:20:20 GMT

Here are the notes for this week’s release:

Pull Requests

We’ve moved the pull request creation UI from a modal dialog to a full page to make room for more context on what you’re sending with your pull request. In this week’s changes, you’ll see the list of commits; look for diffs to appear in the coming weeks.
Corrected several issues where the line that had comments associated was not being properly differentiated in the code snippet previews on pull request discussions.
Corrected an issue where pull request line comments would not appear to be associated with the proper line of code.
Fixed an issue where accepting pull requests was not working properly.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where code snippets could not be inserted using Opera.
Fixed an issue where Internet Explorer displayed an error message when browsing the site using https.
Fixed an issue where the CAPTCHA was not displaying properly on the Contact User page.
Fixed an issue where paging was not working properly in the “Recent Release in Followed Projects” sections for logged in users.

Other

Updated the activity stream to no longer auto-load new items when scrolling down.
Added an explicit download link at the end of the download countdown in case certain browsers/scenarios don’t automatically start downloading.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 5/24/2012

jontsao — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:12:20 GMT

We pushed out a small release today to resolve the following issue:

Fixed an issue that sometimes prevented certain users from downloading project files.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 5/18/2012

jontsao — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:18:48 GMT

Here are the notes for this week’s release:

Pull Requests

We’ve added the ability to see the snippets of code where a user commented inline in the discussion of pull requests.

You can also add another line comment directly from the discussion area, rather than navigating to the code diff viewer.

Note that there’s currently a known issue where the line associated with the comment isn’t being properly differentiated for existing pull requests (the line in the middle of each diff preview should be bolded). Apologies for the inconvenience!
As part of this work, we also took some time to clean up our diff viewer UI to remove the dots and introduce a new color scheme where green is used for added lines.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue affecting the ability to assign pull requests.
Fixed an issue where managing various team resources for a project was not working in Chrome or Firefox.
Fixed an issue where a project’s RSS subscribe dialog popped up in the wrong place.
Fixed an issue where editing wiki anchor links would insert extra characters, resulting in broken links.
Fixed an issue where project logos did not display correctly when browsing the site with https in Chrome or Firefox.
Fixed an issue where users could encounter errors when deleting remote Git branches.
Fixed an issue affecting the ability of fork collaborators to push changes to the fork.
Fixed an issue where the advanced work item filters would not persist when navigating through result pages.
Fixed an issue where the issue tracker notifications link was not clickable in Chrome.
Fixed an issue where pull request comments with line breaks would not be formatted properly when viewing the pull request.

Other

We upgraded our Git servers to version 1.7.10.1.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Easy Credential Caching for Git

Mark_Groves — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:30:00 GMT

A common question since launching our Git support is whether there is a way to cache your username and password so you don’t have to enter it on every push. Well thanks to Andrew Nurse from the ASP.Net team, there is now a great solution for this!

Credential Caching in Windows to the Rescue

Using the Git extension point for credential caching, Andrew created an integration into the Windows Credentials store. After installing git-credential-winstore instead of getting that standard prompt for a username/password, you will get a Windows Security prompt.

From here your credentials for CodePlex will be stored securely within the Windows Credential Store.

Setup

The setup is pretty easy. Download the application from Andrew's git-credential-winstore project. Launch the executable and select yes to have it prompt for credentials. That's it.

Make sure you are running the latest version of msysgit, since the credential's API is fairly new.

Thanks to Andrew for sharing his work. If you have suggestions or improvements you can fork the code here.

Release Notes for 5/10/12

jontsao — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:10:18 GMT

Here are the notes for this week’s release:

Pull Requests

We’ve now added the ability to send pull requests to and from specific branches in your fork and the parent project. This is our first change in a series of improvements we want to make to our pull request workflow.

We’ve also changed the location of the create fork/pull request links so that they’re a little more discoverable and to separate these actions visually from navigation links.

Bug Fixes

We’ve been continuing to tweak and refine our UI. Please keep the feedback coming!

Fixed an issue where the progress indicator would momentarily darken the entire screen when browsing code files, causing users to think that they’re in a rave :).
We darkened the text on input boxes.
We added some color to distinguish between fixed, closed, and open issues when browsing issues.
Fixed an issue where long commit messages would not appear when viewing a commit.
Fixed an issue where discussion timestamps would extend beyond their intended width.
Added some padding around the edges of the site to increase readability on smaller screens/browser sizes such as mobile and table devices.
We reduced the height of some of our visual elements, including the download button and our headings with gray backgrounds.
We’ve also made various tweaks across the site to increase consistency on design elements with the new theme.

Special thanks to the following users who reported issues or gave feedback for this release: hhblaze, pranavkm, jeffyjones, HenrikN, hasanga, radioman, and mattslay.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 5/2/2012

jontsao — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:54:54 GMT

We deployed another release yesterday. Thanks for the great feedback so far on our new look! We’ve been reacting to a bunch of the issues that people have found and will continue to tweak and refine our design. Please keep the feedback coming! Here are the notes for this release:

Fixes: User Interface and Formatting

We took a pass through the text and font in various places to increase the contrast between the foreground and background colors. Let us know if this is an improvement or if there are other areas where the contrast is still too small.
Re-styled various pages to better fit the new UI theme.
Fixed an issue where the site survey was transparent.
Fixed an issue where tables in wikis/documentation lost their borders and could extend beyond their intended boundary.
Fixed the formatting of the Discussion List header.
Fixed an issue in Internet Explorer where long descriptions on forks would extend beyond their intended boundary.
Fixed an issue on the forks list page where the pagination of forks overlapped the filter for setting the number of viewable forks.
Fixed an issue where long usernames would appear cut off in discussion threads.

Fixes: Functionality

Fixed an issue where the My Subscriptions filter for discussions was not working as intended.
Fixed an issue where clicking on a commit when browsing the source code changes in a fork was not working.
Fixed an issue where adding ClickOnce releases was not working as intended.
Fixed an issue where tags for open positions were not working as intended.
We removed the unintentional ability to insert javascript into the discussion list details for project owners. While the results of what users were doing with it were neat, we want to make sure that users can do this type of customization in a supported manner that doesn’t require users to jump through hoops with javascript and DOM manipulation.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

A New Look for CodePlex

Mark_Groves — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned a month ago, we have been working on improving the overall experience for the CodePlex community. Today, I am happy to announce the release of CodePlex’s new look! Our goal was to refresh the look and feel of the site to a modern Metro-inspired theme.

This is the first step in our continued investment to improve the usability within the site. Please let us know your feedback! Also, if you see any bugs or something that doesn’t look quite right in the new pages contact us with the link.

Here are some highlights of the new look released today:

Redesigned Home Pages

We wanted to make it easier to find common actions within CodePlex. So now within the public home, and your logged in home page, you will find large tiles that take you to common actions such as creating or finding a project.

Simple Project Creation

We also made it easier to create new projects. Previously to create a project it was multiple fields, agreement checkboxes, and a CAPTCHA, spread out over three pages.

Now, creating a project is two fields and selection of your source control preference. Much simpler.

We have more things coming, and as always we are very focused on providing users what they ask for, so continue submitting your ideas and voting for feature suggestions! You also can always find us on Twitter at @codeplex or @mgroves84

Release Notes for 4/12/2012

jontsao — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:08:40 GMT

Here are the notes for this week’s release:

Fixed an issue where users could not expand a particular subfolder in the ASP.NET source code tree.
Fixed an issue where incorrect Git branches would appear in the branch selection dropdown on the source control page.
Fixed an issue where colons would appear HTML encoded in users’ activity feed..

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 4/6/2012

jontsao — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:03:10 GMT

Here are the notes for this week’s release:

Fixed an issue where authenticating against Mercurial using capital letters would fail.
Fixed an issue where comments in pull requests were not word wrapping correctly.
Fixed an issue where usernames would overflow their allotted space in discussions.
Fixed an issue that would cause unexpected errors on the source code pages if you created a Git and Mercurial fork with the same name.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Sneak Preview - New CodePlex UI

Mark_Groves — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:27:00 GMT

We have been busy the last several months working to improve the overall experience for the CodePlex community. We have been working through some of the top requested items, such as our big announcement last week enabling Git. Something that is not explicitly on the feature request list are requests to update the web site look and user experience. As Brian Harry mentioned, the Future of CodePlex is Bright, so it is time to start brightening up the place.

Goals

As with any sizeable change you need to decide the scope of changes you want to tackle. We decided that we would optimize on incremental improvements versus taking months to get a completely new experience released. Our goals with this user experience work is to refresh the look and feel of the site, introduce new visual elements and set up the site for future structural changes. So this is not the end, just the beginning.

Early Views

I want to set a few expectations first, these screen shots are not final, and we are still working through the content and final element placement. Feedback is always welcome, just take that in mind as you review the images.

New CodePlex Home

The navigation changed a good bit on the home page and we have moved the search to a more consistent location across the site.

User Profile

Users Home Page

The goal was to make it easier to find and take action on common tasks such as creating projects.

Project Home

Issue Tracker

This should give you a taste of where we are going with the new user experience.

As always we love the feedback, either comment below, find us on Twitter @codeplex or @mgroves84, or create or vote up suggestions.

Release Note for 3/30/2012

Mark_Groves — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:30:00 GMT

We have been pretty busy working on a new UI for CodePlex, ~~I will~~ have a preview post ~~coming shortly~~.

Here are the notes from today’s release:

Updated source code tab to show Author and Committer for Git (Thanks to Brad Wilson for reporting)
Fixed issue where pagination did not work correctly in topic view
Fixed issue where additional comments on a given line of code would get overridden for Git project

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

git commit –m “CodePlex now supports Git!”

Mark_Groves — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:24:00 GMT

Finally, yes, CodePlex now supports Git! Git has been one of the top rated requests from the CodePlex community for some time:

Admittedly, when we launched CodePlex, we never expected that at some point we would be running a source control system originally invented by Linus Torvalds to use for the Linux kernel. Though I would also say, nobody would have thought the open source ecosystem would be as important to Microsoft as it has become now.

Giving CodePlex users what they ask for and supporting their open source efforts has always been important to us, and we have a long list of improvements planned, so stay tuned as we have more up our sleeves!

Why Git?

So why Git? CodePlex already has Mercurial for distributed version control and TFS (which also supports subversion clients) for centralized version control. The short answer is that the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical. Additionally, we just like it, we use Git on our team every day and making the DVCS workflows more available to the CodePlex community is just the right thing to do.

Forks and Pull Requests

One of the capabilities that distributed version control systems, such as Mercurial and Git, enable is the Fork and Pull Request workflow. Just like with Mercurial, projects configured to use Git enable Forking the source and submitting contributions back via Pull Requests. The Fork/Pull Request workflow is a key accelerator to many open source projects and you will see improvements in our support coming later this year.

More Choice

With the addition of Git, now CodePlex has three options when it comes to Open Source project hosting. Projects can now select between TFS, Mercurial, and Git.

Each developer has their own preferences, and for some, centralized version control makes more sense to them. For others, DVCS is the only way to go. We’re equally committed to supporting both these technologies for our users.

You can get started today by creating a new project or contribute to an existing project by creating a fork.

For help on getting started with Git on CodePlex, see our help documentation here. If you would like to switch your project to use Git, please contact us at CodePlex Support with your project information, and we will be happy to help you out.

We're Listening

CodePlex is your community, and we want to deliver the experiences you need to have a successful open source project. We want your ideas and feedback to make CodePlex a great development community. The issue tracker on CodePlex is publicly available. Add suggestions or vote up existing suggestions.

And you can always find us on Twitter, I’m @mgroves84; follow us to keep up to date with our latest releases: @codeplex

Release Notes for 3/15/2012

jontsao — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:59:48 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Updated the GNU Lesser General Public License for new projects to match the latest license version
Deployed several bug fixes around HTTPS support:

Fixed an issue where the advanced view filters in the issue tracker would fail to work under HTTPS.
Fixed an issue where voting was not working properly under HTTPS.
Fixed an issue where navigating using AJAX would fail under HTTPS.
Fixed several other minor scripting errors for various scenarios under HTTPS.

Fixed an issue where text in the Discussions List would appear cut off in Safari.
Fixed an issue where shortcuts on the Work Items page conflicted with standard Mac shortcuts.
Tweaked the design of code snippets in discussion to be consistent with wiki code snippets.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 3/8/2012

jontsao — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:27:42 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Clarified the purpose of the fork name when creating a fork of a project.
Added confirmation messages to deletion of system requirements when editing documentation.
Deployed several bug fixes:

Fixed an issue that was causing AppHarbor build notifications to fail. Thanks to claq2 for the bug report!
Fixed several issues where extremely long titles or descriptions on items on the issues, discussions, profiles, and home pages would not wrap properly.
Fixed a minor wrapping issue around the link to upload patches.
Fixed an issue with viewing RSS feeds in Internet Explorer.
Fixed an issue where replying to a discussion with a quote would push the content past the page margins.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 3/2/2012

jontsao — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:58:49 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Added a progress indicator when saving issues.
Added support for viewing CodePlex RSS feeds in Chrome.
Deployed several bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where the back button on Internet Explorer was not working as intended when browsing code.
- Fixed an issue where long commit comments would push the source control info box outside of the boundaries of the page.
- Fixed an issue where Internet Explorer users were not able to widen the frame of the source code browser until a file was selected.
- Fixed an issue where opening a source code file directly from a URL in Internet Explorer would cause the source code tree to be collapsed.
- Fixed an issue where adding a code snippet with long lines of text to a discussion thread using Internet Explorer would needlessly display a vertical scrollbar, limiting the amount of code visible.
- Fixed an issue where tabbing through some links would render them invisible.
We deprecated support for embedding PreEmptive analytics statistics on the project statistics page. If you’re interested in collecting and reporting your own statistics, PreEmptive’s RunTime Intelligence Endpoint Starter Kit offers a good starting point for capturing data.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one.

Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

Release Notes for 2/23/2012

jontsao — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:50:40 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Continued deployment of further infrastructure changes in preparation for a set of scale improvements to our Mercurial services.
Deployed several bug fixes:

Fixed an issue that prevented users from sharing or bookmarking links to source files easily in Internet Explorer due to the URLs being displayed improperly.
Fixed an issue that prevented users from adjusting the vertical splitter when browsing source code using Internet Explorer.
Fixed an issue with the horizontal scrollbar not appearing when browsing source code.
Fixed an issue where text on multiple lines in discussion posts would be summarized without spaces.

Release Notes for 2/17/2012

jontsao — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:51:53 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Fixed a rare issue that would cause users to sometimes see error messages when browsing source code in Mercurial projects.
Fixed an issue where folder names would wrap poorly in the source code browser when they did not fit in the available width of the frame.
Deployed some infrastructure changes in preparation for a set of scale improvements to our Mercurial services.

Weekly Releases – Notes for 2/9/2012

jontsao — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:22:36 GMT

We have been a bit quiet on this blog recently, but rest assured we are planning some exciting features and changes to the CodePlex site! One change we are making is switching to a weekly release schedule so that we can respond and iterate on user feedback more quickly. As part of that change we will be posting our latest release notes on this blog each week. Some weeks (like today’s notes) may only contain bug fixes if we are working on some larger features that are not ready to be launched yet. Keep watching this space for more developments to come.

Notes for 2/9/2012 release

Fixed an issue in our insert code snippet dialog for our wiki editor. Thanks to Marc D Anderson for reporting this issue!

Activity Stream

Jah OSullivan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:16:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow us on Twitter @matthawley and @codeplex]

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

Redesigned Home Page with Activity Stream

In CodePlex we continuously look for ways to provide our users with the most recent and relevant information they are seeking. It is with this in mind that we released our latest feature, the home page activity stream.

The activity stream showcases events taking place on projects you are a part of as well as projects you are following. There are many different events in the system that causes activities to be created, including starting a discussion, creating a work item etc.

All the functionality that was available on the former home page, such as creating a new project or finding a project that needs help, is available on the right side of the new home page.

The CodePlex team values your feedback. We are frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions, and Issue Tracker. If you have not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few minutes to suggest or vote on a feature you would like to see implemented.

Integration with AppHarbor

Matt Hawley — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:30:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow us on Twitter @matthawley and @codeplex]

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

AppHarbor

In CodePlex, we continue to look for ways to enhance our project hosting offering by partnering with other companies and their services. AppHarbor is a platform to build, execute unit tests, and deploy ASP.NET web applications to the cloud. They provide a free single web instance with a small shared database, which is perfect for .NET OSS applications to provide instant online sample sites.

Setup Instructions

To get started using AppHarbor with an existing CodePlex project, follow the below steps, which I’ve used to setup WikiPlex’s sample site on AppHarbor:

Register for an account (or sign in to an existing account) on AppHarbor, and later confirming your account creation.
Create your first application once you’re signed in to AppHarbor.
Set up a Database, if needed. Executing any SQL scripts manually.
Retrieve your Create build URL from the main page of your application.
Edit your project details on CodePlex, paste the build URL in the textbox, and save.
Make any changes necessary to your codebase to support AppHarbor deployment and commit/push these changes. For example
- If you have multiple solution files or multiple ASP.NET websites in a solution, create an AppHarbor.sln file with only the necessary projects and single ASP.NET website you want deployed.
- If you have any code to determine if you’re running in AppHarbor or not, utilize the Environment appSettings key (Debug is local, Release is running in AppHarbor).
- If you want unit tests to run, make sure you’re using a supported unit testing framework and version.
Sit back, let it compile and deploy!

Source Control Support

You still might be wondering what Source Control types our integration with AppHarbor supports, and I’m excited to say we support both TFS and Mercurial! Additionally, we support the Subversion folder structure (trunk/branches/tags) within TFS projects to correctly extract and send the right branch information to AppHarbor. If your TFS project does not have the standard Subversion folder structure, the entire source repository is treated as the “trunk.” TFS build notifications will have a delay of up to 15 minutes.

When triggering build notifications for Mercurial, CodePlex will always send across all non-closed branches. Mercurial build notifications will be instantaneous when pushing changes to your project’s repository. AppHarbor currently supports only “trunk” or “default” branches when building, testing, and deploying.

Continuous Integration

A feature that has been in our top 10 requests queue for quite some time is project build support. While we still do not offer build support on CodePlex, we do have a few recommendations. Firstly, we have been in discussions with the AppHarbor team in regards to supporting a more formalized continuous integration (CI) solution. No details have been solidified around this yet. Alternatively, CodeBetter provides a CI server farm for OSS projects for a while now, which utilizes TeamCity. You can find more details and setup information on their CI page and join the growing list of CodePlex projects.

Survey Results: Open Source Developer Preferences (June 2011)

jwanagel — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:56:36 GMT

We recently conducted a survey of open source developers to learn about their current preferences on hosting sites and source control systems. We have run this survey twice before so we now have some trending information on the direction that preferences are moving.

The survey was advertised via Twitter, initially posted to http://twitter.com/msdn, but was also re-tweeted by over 100 people. We chose the MSDN twitter account versus the CodePlex one to try and prevent bias towards a specific open source project hosting site.

We had over 1,000 responses to the latest survey, so a good sample size although the statistical degree of certainty is unknown based on the Twitter audience. One of the survey questions was what your preferred operating system for development is so that we can report the results by operating system preference.

Table 1 – Preferences by what is preferred operating system for development

As you can see from the results, the preferences of open source developers are very different between developers preferring Windows, Linux, or Mac, and those preferences are also following different trends.

For Windows users, CodePlex and GitHub are virtually tied with CodePlex having a slight edge to take back rank #1 from GitHub after temporarily falling to #2 in the last survey. GitHub actually saw a decline in preference reversing its trend of skyrocketing popularity, with only CodePlex and Bitbucket showing an increase in the latest results. Source control preferences show a similar result, with TFS showing the biggest increase and Git showing the biggest decline. Distributed version control systems again represent the preference for over 50% of open source developers using Windows.

For Linux and Mac users, GitHub continues to extend its dominant lead in popularity, primarily at the expense of Bitbucket. Git is winning the distributed version control system war among Linux and Mac users, with Mercurial preference dropping sharply. Subversion usage showed a slight resurgence, but distributed version control still dominates being the preference for over 80% of developers using Linux and Mac.

Overall the preferences of open source developers using Windows seem to be getting more divergent from the ones using the Linux and Mac operating systems. Git and GitHub are becoming the de facto standard for Linux and Mac developers, while CodePlex as well as TFS, Mercurial, and Subversion are sharing a large and collectively increasing preference among Windows developers. Generally distributed version control usage is high across all open source developers and seems to be continuing to increase.

StackOverflow Careers now includes user activity from CodePlex

Colin Thompkins — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:54:00 GMT

Stack Overflow Careers is an innovative new job site for programmers. One thing they have recognized is that participation in open source projects is a great way for potential employers to learn more about a job candidate, and also give developers a new way of differentiating themselves with employers. So they have now announced the ability to automatically incorporate your work on CodePlex projects into your StackOverflow Careers 2.0 profile.

We provide a secure way for StackOverflow to confirm that you are indeed a member of your CodePlex projects, and then display those projects on your profile.

Additionally, since StackOverflow Careers is invitation only, they have provided a mechanism where you can prequalify to join if you are an active developer on CodePlex.

You can check to see if you prequalify here.

Pull Request Listing, Recent Releases in Followed Projects, and Projects You May Like

Matt Hawley — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:20:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow us on Twitter @matthawley and @codeplex]

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

Pull Request Listing

We now provide the ability to view a history of all of the pull requests that have been sent by project members. You can filter those requests by status and/or reviewer.

As you can see, each submitted pull request is listed, along with some metadata, including who submitted it, when it was submitted, its state, and the number of comments made.

Recent Releases in Followed Projects

If you’re following any projects, and you’re signed into the site, you’ll notice a list of recent releases in all of the projects that you’re following on the left most side of the CodePlex site home page.

Each item on the list consists of the project name, the most recent release, and the release description.

Projects You May Like

The Projects Users Are Following section has been replaced with a generated list of projects that we think you may like based on the projects you’re currently following.

Each item on the list consists of the project name and description. We also made it easy for you to follow the project should you wish to do so.

.NET Open Source Community – CodePlex / GitHub Comparision

jwanagel — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:02:31 GMT

The .NET segment of the open source ecosystem has been one of the fastest growing over the last few years. The vast majority of all projects on CodePlex are .NET related, and among .NET developers CodePlex is generally the most well-known open source project hosting site. The number of new projects started on CodePlex has been ever accelerating as shown in the following chart:

CodePlex / GitHub Comparisons

GitHub is another open source project hosting site that has been rising in popularity. Although GitHub is primarily used by developers preferring Mac or Linux, there are also many .NET developers that use it for their projects. Sometimes we get questions about how the .NET open source developer community compares between CodePlex and GitHub, so below includes some information around that.

Project Counts

After CodePlex, GitHub probably has the largest number of .NET projects among the various open source project hosting sites. The following table shows both the total counts and “Popular Project” counts (projects with at least 5 followers):

	CodePlex	GitHub (C# projects)
Total Projects	22,030	8,908 *
Popular Projects (5+ followers)	3,621	910

Between the two sites there are over thirty thousand projects, although CodePlex has approximately 2.5x as many .NET projects as GitHub. For popular projects, CodePlex has approximately 4x as many. We’re not sure whether this is because popular .NET projects are more likely to choose CodePlex, or the community on CodePlex is more likely to make a .NET project popular, but it is probably some combination of both.

* GitHub does not require developers to specify a license, and typically less than half of them do. Without a license specified, a project is not considered true “Open Source” since without specifying a valid open source license, project users do not actually have the legal rights that an open source license provides. The above table counts the total number, not just the number of C# projects with an open source license specified.

Popular Projects

I think another interesting statistic is the percentage of total projects that are “Popular” using the same metric of having 5 or more followers. The following table shows the popular project percentage for CodePlex and GitHub, including for just the subset of GitHub projects that are C# and Objective-C:

Site	Languages	% Popular Projects
CodePlex	<All>	16.4%
GitHub	C#	10.2%
GitHub	<All>	9.3%
GitHub	Objective-C	24.9%

The percentage of popular projects on CodePlex is higher than for C# projects on GitHub, but both are higher than the percentage of popular projects across all languages on GitHub. However for Objective-C projects on GitHub, a very high percentage of them are popular. GitHub is very popular among Mac developers, so is presumably the correlation there.

Overall Summary

I think it is great to see the growth in the .NET open source community, and all indications are it will only continue growing faster. I believe CodePlex has done a lot to help encourage and support .NET open source developers and look forward to helping many thousand more open source projects become popular and successful!