CodePlex Weblog

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

Jahmai 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!

OData Service for TFS 2010, try it out on CodePlex

Colin Thompkins — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:39:00 GMT

The Visual Studio team just recently released the beta of the OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010. Check out the announcement here.

To help get customer feedback, they made the service available to all CodePlex TFS users here: https://codeplexodata.cloudapp.net/

So go ahead and give it a try. Any questions or feedback about the service can be sent to TFSOData@Microsoft.com.

Pull Request Diff Notes, Adding Changesets, and a Vertical Splitter

Matt Hawley — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:40:00 GMT

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

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

Pull Request Diff Notes

In a continuation of the pull request conversations feature that we added in our March release, we’ve added the ability to add notes to files that are submitted as part of a pull request. As a signed in user, you can click on individual file lines within a pull request diff view and enter a note for others to see.

The notes that you and other contributors enter are integrated into the pull request comments view. Clicking on the linked file name will bring up the inline diff view and jump to the line that the note is associated with.

Updating Pull Requests

One of our most common requests has been for us to provide the ability to update a pull request with change sets that have been added since the pull request was sent. This is now attainable by way of the ‘Add Change Sets’ link on the pull request page.

Vertical Splitter

The inline diff and source control browser views have been updated with an adjustable vertical splitter that allows you to expand/shrink the file/diff view to your liking.

You can see these enhancements live by viewing the associated pull request onWikiPlex.

Pull Request Conversations, Inline Diff Enhancements

Matt Hawley — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:56:39 GMT

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

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website today.

Pull Request Conversations

Previously, the only way for project members and users who submitted pull requests to converse was via e-mail. This complicated the review process and made conversations isolated and difficult to track. For this release, we’ve added functionality that enables you to have those same conversations within the pull request page.

When you view a pull request, you’ll now see “Comments” and “Changes” tabs, with current comments displayed.

Inline Diff Enhancements

We tweaked the inline diff experience to make it easier to traverse diff blocks. When you open up the inline diff experience, you’ll now see up and down arrows.

To move between the diff blocks, you can use those arrows or utilize the available keyboard shortcuts.

Lastly, we have also brought the inline diff experience to the source control changes page for project and fork changesets.

You can see both enhancements live by viewing the associated pull request or changeset changes on WikiPlex.

Pull Request Changes, Multi-Selection in Advanced View, and Advertisement Changes

Matt Hawley — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:15:00 GMT

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

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website today.

Pull Request Changes

In this release, we have begun to re-focus on Pull Requests to ensure a productive experience between the project users and developers. We feel we made significant progress in this area for this release and look forward to using your feedback to drive future iterations.

One of the biggest hurdles people have indicated is the inability to see what a pull request includes without pulling the source down from a Mercurial client. With today’s changes, any user has the ability to view a pull request, the changesets / changes included, and perform an inline diff of the file.

When a pull request is made, the CodePlex website will query for all outgoing changes from the fork to the main repository for a point-in-time comparison. Because of this point-in-time comparison…

All existing pull requests created prior to this release will not have changesets associated with them.
If new commits are pushed to the fork while a pull request is active, they will not appear associated with the pull request. The pull request will need to be re-submitted for them to appear.

Once a pull request is created, you can “View the Pull Request” which takes you to a page that looks like

As you may notice, we now display a lot more detailed information regarding that pull request including who it was requested by and when, the associated changesets, the description, who it’s assigned to (we’ll come back to this) and the listing of summarized file changes. What you’ll also notice, is that each modified file has the ability to view a diff of all changes made. When you click “(view diff)” for a file, an inline diff experience appears.

This new experience allows you to quickly navigate through all of the modified files as well as viewing the various change blocks for each file. You’ll also notice as you browse through each file’s changes, we update the URL to include the file path so you can quickly send a direct link to a pull request’s file. Clicking “(close diff)” will bring you back to the original pull request view. View this pull request live on WikiPlex.

Pull Request Review Assignment

Another new feature we added for pull requests is the ability for project members to assign pull requests for review.

Any project member has the ability to assign (and re-assign if needed) a pull request to a project member. Once the assignment has been made, that project member will be notified via email of the assignment. Once they complete the review of the pull request, they can either accept or deny it similarly to the previous process.

Multi-Selection in Advanced View Filters

One of the more recent requests we have heard from users is the ability multi-select advanced view filters for work items. We are happy to announce this is now possible. Simply control-click the multiple options for each filter item and your work item query will be refined as such.

Should you happen to unselect all options for a given filter, it will automatically reset to the default option for that filter. Furthermore, the “Direct Link” URL will be updated to include the multi-selected options for each filter.

Note: The “Direct Link” feature was released in our previous deployment, just never written about. It allows you to capture the current state of your query and send it to other individuals.

Advertisement Changes

Very recently, the advertiser (The Lounge) we partnered to provide advertising revenue for projects, or donated to charity, was acquired by Lake Quincy Media. There has been no change in the advertising platform offering, and all projects have been converted over to using the new infrastructure. Project owners should note the new contact information for getting paid.

The CodePlex team values your feedback, and is frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions and Issue Tracker for new features or problems. If you’ve not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.

Profile Picture Thumbnails, Following Projects, and Fork Collaboration

Matt Hawley — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:18:59 GMT

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

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website last week.

Profile Picture Thumbnails

We have added a way to select a thumbnail from your profile picture, which will start appearing next to usernames across the site. Managing your thumbnail is simple. From your profile page, choose Edit your profile. On the left side, you’ll find an intuitive widget for choosing a profile picture, uploading it, and editing your thumbnail image.

If you previously uploaded a profile picture, we’ve used that to generate a starter thumbnail. We welcome your suggestions and ideas for areas where seeing user thumbnails would be useful or interesting.

Following Projects

Based on some feedback we’ve received recently, we have taken several steps to help you discover and follow interesting and popular projects on CodePlex:

The homepage now surfaces the top Projects Users are Following from the previous 7 days.
When you visit any project homepage, you can see at a glance how many people follow the project.
When you visit the People tab for any project, you will see both the project contributors and the 25 most recent project followers.

Fork Collaboration

We now support enabling collaborators on a fork based on a large number of user requests.

From the Source Code management page for your fork, you will now see the following on the right side:

To add a collaborator, type in a username and click Add. All fork collaborators will have the ability to push to the fork and send/cancel pull requests. To remove a collaborator, hover over user, and click on the X that appears:

Survey results: Open source developer preferences

jwanagel — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:38:00 GMT

We recently conducted a survey of open source developers to learn about their current preferences around hosting sites and source control systems. The survey was primarily advertised via Twitter, and we tried to avoid pushing the survey among audiences that would be specifically oriented towards a particular site (for example we did not advertise the survey from the CodePlex twitter account).

In total there were just under 500 responses, so a reasonable sample size although not necessarily enough to guarantee fully representative results. One of the survey questions was what is your preferred operating system for development, and looking at the results they are particularly interesting when split by operating system preference because of how significant the difference is:

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

As you can see, the preferences among developers which prefer Windows is very different from Linux and Mac oriented developers. Again, the question was on what operating system they prefer to use for development, and didn’t ask what type of applications they create, so presumably many create things like websites which are cross-platform from a user perspective regardless of the operating system they prefer developing with.

For hosting site preference, CodePlex and GitHub are roughly tied for first place among Windows developers and combined are preferred by over 75%. However with Linux and Mac developers, GitHub has a runaway lead over the other sites. Perhaps not particularly surprising, CodePlex has negligible mindshare among Linux and Mac developers. It is somewhat surprising how low SourceForge and Google Code are given historically they used to rank much higher.

Looking at version control preferences is also interesting. Among Windows developers TFS, Mercurial, Subversion, and Git all have a sizable following. While for Linux and Mac developers it is almost all Git and Mercurial, with Git having a substantial lead. Git is generally considered to run better on Linux and have more of a Unix feel, so not really surprising to see it more popular there compared to Windows developers. It is surprising how low Subversion has dropped since it was the dominant preference not long ago for open source developers. Around a quarter of Windows developers still prefer Subversion, but Linux and Mac developers have largely abandoned it. The trend towards distributed version control systems (e.g. Mercurial and Git) is strong, with over 50% of Windows developers now prefer DVCS, and over 80% of Linux and Mac developers.

Work Item Keyboard Shortcuts, Resolving Mercurial Work Items, WikiPlex 2.0

Matt Hawley — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:33:58 GMT

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

We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software yesterday.

Keyboard Shortcuts

With this release, we have added a set of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks in the Issue Tracker. This feature is a popular request in the CodePlex Issue Tracker. The CodePlex team visits the issue tracker frequently when researching and considering new features. If you haven’t visited it recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.

To view the available shortcuts, type ? from any page within the issue tracker to see this help dialog:

You can see what each shortcut invokes below:

Please give us feedback on this feature and let us know what additional shortcuts would be useful.

Resolve Work Items When Pushing Mercurial Changes

Another feature we added is the ability to resolve work items when push changes to your Mercurial repository, which has been available to our TFS / SVN users for quite some time. The required format is identical to the SVN format listed here. When committing your changes locally, add "Work Items: Id, AnotherId" to your commit message.

When you push, CodePlex will detect this comment, add a commit message, and resolve the work item.

WikiPlex Goes 2.0!

CodePlex continues to improve WikiPlex, our open source wiki engine. Wikiplex hit another major milestone today with the release of version 2.0! We have added several new features, including: interleaving ordered and unordered lists, specifying the height and width for images, a multi-line indentation macro, and a restructuring of some of the API. Visit Matt's announcement for more information on the release or grab the binaries via NuGet or CodePlex.

Topic View and Subscriptions for Project Discussions

Matt Hawley — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:28:00 GMT

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

We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software last week. But, before we get into the new functionality…

Welcome our new Program Manager, Ada Cole

Hello, CodePlex users! My name is Ada Cole, and I’m excited to be the Program Manager on the CodePlex Team! Over the last couple of weeks, I have enjoyed so much - helping to develop the new feature below, learning more about open source, and working with a high-performance development and test team in an agile environment.

The best part, though, has been discovering all the ways in which the voice of our users influences the site on a daily basis. Everyone on the team has a passion for delivering a great customer experience. Customer insights and comments are an integral part of everything we do. I am looking forward to having more conversations with you, the CodePlex users, and involving you even more in the future of CodePlex.

If you will be at PDC, I hope you will be able to join me and some of the team for an Open Source social discussion on Thursday, Oct. 28. You can reach me any time on twitter (@adacole_msft) or by email (adacole@microsoft.com) if you are able to attend our PDC town hall, or if there is anything you'd like to discuss.

Topic View and Subscriptions for Project Discussions

With this release, we have enabled a new all-up discussions view in response to the popular request for a way to segment discussions.

Topic View will show a list of topics (previously known as tags) and allow users to drill down by topic to view associated discussions. This feature enables project owners to organize a high volume discussions list or to easily separate discussions across discrete topics so all users can focus specifically on areas of interest, similar to the concept of sub-forums.

A project’s discussions page now has two options. Classic View keeps things the same, and topics remain optional. Topic View is opt-in, and will require users to tag discussions with one or more topics. New projects will have discussion pages set to Topic View by default, but the page will display in Classic View until the two ore more topics have been defined.

To change the view of your project, go to Discussions and click on the “Edit Discussion Details” link. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Topic View radio button and click Save. If you currently do not have any topics, you can easily add them by entering the desired name and clicking Add Topic.

Once the Topic View is selected, and users start creating discussions, the discussions list will start to look like the following:

Note: Until you have defined two or more topics, the users will continue to see discussions in Classic View.

The first time you switch to Topic View, all discussions that have not been assigned a topic will be associated with the system tag, “General”. You can migrate discussions out of “General” by editing each discussion and selecting the appropriate topic(s). If you are already using “General”, unassociated discussions will be found under the existing “General” topic.

We have also added the ability to subscribe to email notifications at a topic level. When you have selected a topic, the issue notification box on the right hand side will now be in the context of the currently selected topic. Clicking the “get email notifications” link will open a dialog allowing you to select immediate delivery, daily digest, or unsubscribe completely.

Note: Should you already be subscribed at the project level, you will be unable to subscribe to a topic since you are already receiving notifications for all topics.

The system topic “General” does not allow subscriptions because users will not be able to associate future discussions with “General”. To receive notifications for replies to these discussions, you should instead subscribe to project level notifications.

As you use the new Topic View, please send feedback our way so we can continue to improve it!

CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

jwanagel — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:52:43 GMT

The Microsoft CodePlex.com team has donated $25,000 to the Mercurial project, responding to the recent appeal by the project leader, Matt Mackall. Earlier this year we added Mercurial as a choice on CodePlex to provide an option to our users to use a distributed version control system. Since then, there have been over 1,500 new projects using Mercurial, as well as numerous projects that have migrated from other forges to CodePlex.com.

While Team Foundation Server is still the most used version control system on CodePlex, our users are clearly benefiting from having access to Mercurial for their open source projects. The CodePlex team is happy to be able to offer our community of more than 17,000 projects a choice. With Mercurial as an important feature of CodePlex, we are excited to be making this donation to help support the Mercurial project.

We asked Matt Mackall some questions to share a little bit more about Mercurial, and why he decided to make it his day job:

What is the Mercurial project, and how have you been involved?

Matt: Mercurial is an open source distributed version control system. I started the Mercurial project a little over five years ago and have been the project leader ever since. It's now an active community project with hundreds of contributors and tens of thousands of users.

What has Microsoft’s relationship been with the Mercurial project until now?

Matt: Microsoft has been supporting users of Mercurial in the Windows world through its CodePlex.com platform, which gives users the option of hosting their projects using Mercurial.

What does the donation mean for you, and the community, and how will it be used?

Matt: The donation is going to help fund my work as a full-time project leader over the next year. Up to this point, I've worked on Mercurial mostly in my spare time, which has meant that Mercurial has not progressed as fast as it might have. By making Mercurial my primary focus, I will hopefully be able to better leverage the community's contributions and accelerate Mercurial's development.

Where to from here? What's next for Mercurial, and what long term goals do you have for it?

Matt: Always a tough question with a community-driven project - we never know what feature is going to be finished next. But we're making progress on some of our long-standing wishlist features like improved compression and faster networking, so expect good things in upcoming releases.

Windows Live Writer Support and Source Code Branch Selector

Matt Hawley — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:08:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow me on Twitter @matthawley]

We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software yesterday.

Windows Live Writer Support

With this release, we have implemented our #1 project feature request, Updating Wiki Pages with Windows Live Writer! Following up on our prior release of enabling Html Markup for wiki pages, we have extended the support of editing your wiki pages using Windows Live Writer via the MetaWeblog API.

Getting started using Windows Live Writer with your CodePlex project is fairly simple. Just add a new “blog account” selecting “Other Blog Service”, and entering your project URL, your CodePlex username and CodePlex password.

Clicking the “Next >” button, Windows Live Writer will connect to your project page and retrieve all of the necessary information it requires to post entries.

Note: Windows Live Writer may prompt you to post a temporary entry to try and detect the themes. You can skip this step, as allowing it to run will not produce any different results. If you do allow this step to run, the temporary entry will be deleted for you.

When the setup process has finished, Windows Live Writer will allow you to nickname the account and switch to using it immediately.

Now that your CodePlex project is setup as an account, you have access to open wiki pages, edit wiki pages, and create new wiki pages.

Creating New Content
Clicking on “File –> New post” will open an empty space for you to start writing your wiki content. Enter a unique title, and start writing your content.

When you have finished editing your content, click the “Publish” button. This will create a new wiki page in your project titled “Demo Page”. Visiting your project page, you can click on the “Change History (all pages)” link to find that page that was just created.

Editing Existing Content
Clicking on “File –> Open” and selecting your project will query the CodePlex servers to retrieve all of your current wiki pages, regardless if they’re currently in Wiki Markup or Html Markup.

Note: If you select an existing wiki page that is in Wiki Markup, it will be auto-converted to Html Markup for you. After saving the page, it will be Html Markup going forward.

At this point, Windows Live Writer opens that wiki page up for editing.

Once you have completed editing your content, click the “Publish” button. This will update the existing wiki page in your project.

Windows Live Writer Q&A
Q: Can I add images to my wiki pages through Windows Live Writer?
A: Yes, images will be uploaded to CodePlex and attached to the wiki page.

Q: Can I add code samples to my wiki pages through Windows Live Writer?
A: Yes, you can use one of the many plugins to insert code. We recommend using Insert Code for Windows Live Writer, Source Code Formatter, or PreCode.

Q: Do I have to use Windows Live Writer?
A: No. Since we implement the MetaWeblog API, you can use any tool that uses this same API.

Q: Can I embed videos or Silverlight applications using Windows Live Writer?
A: No. Similarly to the web based editor, we will ignore this content. We are looking into supporting this in the future, however.

Source Code Branch Selector

With this release, we are now displaying a selectable list of branches for our Mercurial based projects on the Source Control page. This will allow users to limit the scope of changesets to that branch (and its ancestors) as well as download the source code for that branch.

Should your project only contain the “default” branch, the branch selector will not be displayed. The branch selector will also hide any closed branches, even though the related changesets are visible in the “All” view.

WYSIWYG Wiki Editor

Matt Hawley — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:10:39 GMT

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

WYSIWYG Wiki Editor

With this release, we have enabled the ability for project members to edit their wiki pages in either the Wiki Markup or with a WYSIWYG Html editor. When you create or edit a wiki page, you’ll have the ability to switch between Wiki Markup and Html Markup.

If you currently have existing Wiki Markup and click the Html Markup option, the Wiki Markup will be converted to HTML Markup for you. You can always switch back to using Wiki Markup, but the content will revert to the original Wiki Markup for the current version. That means

Switching to Html Markup, editing content in the WYSIWYG editor, and then switching to Wiki Markup will not retain your changes.
Once an Html Markup page is saved, switching to Wiki Markup will result in no Wiki Markup available.

Below you will see the converted Wiki Markup of the home page for WikiPlex.

Here are a few tips for working with the Html Markup:

You can always go back to a prior Wiki Markup version to either save it as the current version or copy the Wiki Markup to be used later.
When the Wiki Markup to Html Markup conversion executes – the RSS, Silverlight and Video macros will be rendered as friendly text with a link to the resource.
When attaching files or images within your wiki page, we now list each attachment as a link to the resource allowing you to right-click and copy the URL to be used in either the image or link editor.
You can have a mixture of Wiki Markup and Html Markup pages within your project. There is no reason to convert everything over if you don’t want to.

Mercurial Servers Upgraded to 1.6

We also upgraded our Mercurial servers to the latest version. By upgrading to this version, you have the ability to take advantage of the latest features of Mercurial, including pushing Bookmarks to the server. Click here for a complete list of new features or bug fixes in Mercurial 1.6.

ClickOnce Releases

Matt Hawley — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:20:18 GMT

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Support for ClickOnce Releases

With today’s release, we are happy to announce that our #1 most requested feature, hosting ClickOnce applications directly from the CodePlex website, is now available for all projects! For those that are not familiar with ClickOnce, it is a .NET deployment technology that enables a user to install and run a Windows application by simply clicking a link from a web page. ClickOnce applications are also inherently self-updating, as they check for newer versions as they become available. ClickOnce applications are also “low-impact”, in other words, they do not need administrative rights to install, only install for the current user, and are isolated from other ClickOnce applications.

Since there is no direct way of publishing your ClickOnce application to CodePlex from within Visual Studio, we have attempted to make the process as simple as possible. The next few sections will walk you through the preparation and publishing, and ultimately creating a ClickOnce release on CodePlex.

Publishing a ClickOnce Application

This first step assumes that you have an existing .NET Windows application (Console/Windows Forms/ WPF) that you wish to publish using ClickOnce. When you open the Publish dialog (Build -> Publish) from Visual Studio, the first step will ask for a location to place the published ClickOnce application files. Feel free to change this value to an easy-to-remember path on your computer.

The next step asks where users will be installing this application from. Select “From a Web Site” and type the following in the textbox, replacing “ProjectName” with your project name.

http://ProjectName.codeplex.com/releases/clickonce

This is a very important step, and the CodePlex software ensures that your ClickOnce application has a valid URL that matches your project.

At this point, you can either click “Next” to walk through a few other steps or you can click on “Finish” to complete the publish operation.

Preparing the ClickOnce Application for CodePlex

If you open up the location where your application is published, you’ll see a folder structure similar to the following:

As you can see, there isn’t just a single executable that can be uploaded. Each version of your ClickOnce application has a folder with the necessary files in it that is contained in the “Application Files” folder. To prepare the ClickOnce Application for CodePlex, zip the entire directory, making sure the *.application file is at the root of the zip file.

Note: This is a mandatory zip file structure that is required. Validation of your ClickOnce application will fail if this is not followed.

Creating a ClickOnce Release

When you create a new release for your project, you’ll notice a new checkbox underneath the release name. When that is checked, a file upload control is displayed. Select the zip file you created in the last step and fill out the rest of the create release form.

A few notes about ClickOnce releases

1. The ClickOnce application becomes your “default file”. There is no way of making another file for that release the default.
2. ClickOnce releases are always public. There is no way of “hiding” them.
3. You can only have 1 active ClickOnce release at a time. All older ClickOnce releases will be “archived”, which means they are still accessible you just cannot make them recommended releases, or update the release’s ClickOnce application.

When the ClickOnce release has been created, you’ll be redirected to view the release.

If you click on the “ClickOnce Installer” link, it will start the download and ClickOnce installer.

Note: The ClickOnce installer will launch only for Internet Explorer and FireFox (should you have the plugin installed). If you are prompted to download the application file, save this file locally and execute it to launch the ClickOnce installer.

Clicking on “Install” will install and launch the application.

Updating a ClickOnce Release

When you have a new version of your project to release, you should follow the same steps for publishing and preparing your ClickOnce application.

Note: Visual Studio should retain the URL that you previously specified during publishing.

When you are ready to upload the ClickOnce zip file, you have the choice of updating the current ClickOnce release or creating an entirely new ClickOnce release. The latter of the two will archive your current ClickOnce release automatically. Both choices will prompt your users to update the currently installed application on the next launch.

Upgrading all TFS servers to TFS 2010

Matt Hawley — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:18:35 GMT

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The information in this entry applies to project coordinators and developers that are using TFS with the Team Explorer client. If you are using Mercurial or a Subversion client, then nothing will change for you.

During the upcoming weeks we will be migrating all of the CodePlex TFS projects onto our new TFS 2010 servers. This upgrade will allow us to support new TFS features and provide increased server performance and reliability. The move will happen on a server by server basis, so expect each TFS server (TFS01 to TFS10) to be down for a few hours as data is migrated. Updates on when each server will be offline and an estimate on when they will be back online will be posted on our system outage page.

As part of this migration, the URL of your TFS server will change and this will require you to update your projects source control bindings. After your project has moved, instructions on how to connect with Team Explorer to the new TFS server can be found on the source control tab of your project under “Source Control Setup”. If you need help updating your source control bindings, you can view our detailed instructions online. Additionally, if you connect to your project using Visual Studio Team Explorer 2005, you will need to install the 2005 forward compatibility pack. If you connect using Team Explorer 2008, you will need to install the 2008 forward compatibility pack.

Finally, the TFS 2010 upgrade process checks two build templates files into your project under \BuildProcessTemplates. These templates can be removed safely as we currently do not support TF build.

Search Project Openings, New Ad Format, and more

Matt Hawley — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:18:40 GMT

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Project Openings Enhancements

With today’s release, CodePlex users now have the ability to search for project openings across all projects. Prior to today’s release, a user looking to contribute to projects that were requesting help required knowing about those specific projects. This feature is not limited to just developers, but any resource a project could be looking for (ie, testers, designers, editors).

When visiting the CodePlex site, clicking on the Project Openings link will direct you to a listing of projects with openings sorted with the most recent openings first. What you’ll notice, is the layout is similar to the Project Directory, except that opening descriptions are displayed in green text above the project description.

Clicking on the “Join this Project” link will direct you to the homepage of the project with the request dialog open and ready for your submission.

Another difference you’ll notice is how tagging is handled with project openings. As a project coordinator, you can tag your project opening with specific keywords. When CodePlex users visit the project openings page, they can utilize the tags specified to refine the results.

Ad Format Change

For projects that have The Lounge ads enabled, you will notice that larger 300 x 250 pixel ads are being displayed on the project’s pages. Just as adding the larger ads to a downloads page, increasing the ad size across the project will dramatically increase the ad revenue for project owners to better support their project (or charity contributions to Habitat for Humanity Int’l).

Fork Actions on Changeset Listing Page

After the recent release of the ability to view a fork’s changeset listing directly within CodePlex, we wanted to make managing forks as easy as possible. With today’s release, all fork actions are now available directly on the changeset listing page. No longer will you need to jump back to the listing of forks to send a pull request, apply/decline a pull request, or even delete a fork.

Silverlight 4 Support

The CodePlex wiki has been upgraded to support Silverlight 4 by default. Existing Silverlight applications hosted on CodePlex should continue to work due to built-in backwards compatibility. Should you need to explicitly specify the version for your Silverlight application, add the “version=3” parameter to your macro (you can also specify “version=2”).

Multiple Project Downloads, Wiki Enhancements and more

Matt Hawley — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:57:17 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow me on Twitter @matthawley]

We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Multiple Project Downloads

With today’s release, CodePlex users now have the ability to set multiple default releases for their project. The primary usage for this feature is for projects that are jointly developing and distributing pre-stable versions while still maintaining a current stable release. When creating or editing a release, you are allowed to set that release as a recommended release. If you currently have a recommended release, you’ll be prompted to either add to or replace the recommended releases.

When multiple default releases are active, and a user visits the Downloads page, they are shown a listing of the recommended releases. This view will allow them to see high-level information regarding each release and quickly download file’s associated with a particular release. The most recently created project will show first.

Another feature that was added, was the ability to not have any recommended files for a release. This is very helpful for applications that distribute multiple downloads, all of which have no more importance over the other. A primary use for this, is if a project distributes both an x86 and x64 version of their application – neither of which should be the recommended release as it requires a decision by the downloader.

Wiki Enhancements

A long requested feature (currently #3 most requested), deleting wiki pages has been added! We have also simplified creating new wiki pages. When viewing a wiki page, you’ll now see two new sub-menu links.

Clicking on “Create New Page” will take you to a page allowing you to supply a title and wiki markup. After saving, you can link to this page from any other page by using the inter-wiki link syntax [Page Title].

Clicking on “Delete”, will do just that. Any wiki page children of the page you’re deleting will be moved to the deleting page’s parent. All history, comments, and attachments will be permanently destroyed.

Forks on User Profile

Lastly, a new feature that was added is the ability to view a CodePlex user’s forks across all projects easily. When you visit a user profile page, the listing of forks is displayed on the right hand side. Clicking on the fork’s name will bring you to view all of the forks change sets.

Application Analytics and Browsing Forks

Matt Hawley — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:38:04 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow me on Twitter @matthawley]

We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Application Analytics

With today’s release, CodePlex users now have the ability to instrument their applications to get analytics on their runtime usage. CodePlex has long offered reports on what user activity occurs on the project website, but what happened after the user downloaded the software was unknown. Now, using this new application analytics capability, CodePlex users can see information such as how many people are using the application.

This capability is provided by the new Runtime Intelligence Service from PreEmptive Solutions. The Runtime Intelligence Service allows for developers to inject usage instrumentation directly into application binaries. When the application is run by an end user, the instrumentation will collect analytics data from the application. No personally identifiable information is ever collected and applications can include opt-out dialogues.

CodePlex users instrument their .NET applications via the latest release of Dotfuscator Software Services Community Edition included in Visual Studio 2010. Application analytic reports will then be available on CodePlex from the project statistics page with the ability to view more advanced statistics through a portal hosted by PreEmptive Solutions.

Getting started with instrumenting your application is easy. PreEmptive Solutions has created a sample application and a very thorough walkthrough that demonstrates this process. Once you have instrumented your application, you will need to link your CodePlex project to your Runtime Intelligence Service Application ID (which was created in the first step in the walkthrough). As a project coordinator, edit the project details and enter the value as shown below.

Should your startup / shutdown instrumentation mean something different, you can change the display name, which will be used instead of “Application Runs” when viewing the statistics in CodePlex. After you save these settings, CodePlex will begin importing the application runtime usage on a daily basis.

Browsing Forks

Also with today’s release, you now have the ability to browse a fork’s source code similarly to browsing a project’s source code. When you view the listing of forks, each fork name is now clickable.

Upon clicking the fork name, you’ll be taken to a familiar change set listing page. From there, you can view change set details, browse the fork’s source code, and download the individual change sets just as you would for a project.

.NET 4 and Change Set Listing

Matt Hawley — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:53:35 GMT

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Upgraded to .NET 4

While normally we wouldn’t mention an infrastructure upgrade, we decided that with the recent launch of .NET 4, our more technical audience wouldn’t mind knowing that we are constantly evolving. In fact, we have been running prior beta, escrow and release candidate builds of .NET 4 for several months now. Along with this, we have also upgraded to ASP.NET MVC 2.

Change Set Listing

Another requested feature from our users has been to view the listing of files that have been added, modified, or deleted in a particular change set.

With this page, we are finally highlighting an existing (but rarely known) feature, viewing a diff of the file. The “view diff” link will be present for edited files, and will open a new window with the difference view. To see this in action, view a change set for WikiPlex.

The difference engine (DiffPlex) was built-in house by Matt Manela and is available as an open source project on CodePlex.

Windows Live™ ID Support, Download Page Ads, and Other Changes

Matt Hawley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:13:00 GMT

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Windows Live™ ID Support

The #2 requested feature for CodePlex has been to support logging in using your Windows Live™ ID account. We’re happy to say, that with this release this is now possible! The next time you visit the login screen, you’ll see a “Sign In” button at the top.

Once that button is clicked, you’ll be redirected to Windows Live™ ID to authenticate. Upon successfully authenticating, you’ll be redirected back to CodePlex. When you return to CodePlex, you’ll be prompted to login with your CodePlex credentials to associate your Windows Live™ ID account to your CodePlex account.

A quick Q&A that should answer the most important questions:

Q: Why do I still need a CodePlex account?
A: We still require a CodePlex account to successfully authenticate with the source control servers.

Q: Can I use my Windows Live™ ID login when connecting to TFS or Mercurial?
A: No. Both TFS and Mercurial require Active Directory credentials to verify your identity.

Q: Will I have to still log in with my CodePlex credentials every time I authenticate with Windows Live™ ID?
A: No. This one-time operation is required to associate your Windows Live™ ID account with a CodePlex account. Successive authentications with Windows Live™ ID will automatically authenticate you with CodePlex.

Q: I’m a new user and would like to authenticate with Windows Live™ ID. Do I first need to register with CodePlex and later associate it with my Windows Live™ ID account?
A: No. You can click the Sign In with Windows Live™ ID button on the user registration page. Upon authenticating with Windows Live™ ID, you’ll be redirected back to CodePlex to complete your user registration.

Download Page Ads

CodePlex allows project owners to include ads on their project pages from The Lounge, with the ad revenue going directly to either the project owners to help support the project, or donated to Habitat for Humanity Int’l.

With this release, we enabled a new feature that will dramatically increase the ad revenue for project owners to better support their project. When a user downloads any file from a release, they’ll be taken to a page displaying two 300 x 250 pixel ads while the file is downloading. This download page only applies to projects where the project owner has decided to include ads on their project.

Mercurial Hosting Changes

In this release we have made a few minor changes to our Mercurial hosting.

We upgraded the server software to version 1.5
We are always using canonical URLs for repositories (https://hg01.codeplex.com/WikiPlex will be redirected to https://hg01.codeplex.com/wikiplex)
Fork clone URLs are displayed as clickable links (bug #25371)
Downloading and browsing the latest source code will always use the most recent change set from the “default” branch

Search Term Suggestions

With this release, we have introduced a Search Term Suggestions popup when typing in any of the project search textboxes. After typing 4 characters, you’ll be presented with a listing of terms other users have searched for. You can then use either your mouse or the up/down arrow keys to select one of these existing search terms.

PowerShell Syntax Highlighting Support

In this release we have added syntax highlighting support for PowerShell scripts. This includes support in the source code browser, wiki (via {code:powershell} syntax), and a code syntax selection for discussion lists. You can see an example of this output in the SQL Server PowerShell Extensions project.