On Friday, we released the latest version of the CodePlex software featuring the Telerik RadEditor on the Project Discussion pages.
The RadEditor features include: font choice, font size, font style, bullet points and numbering, indent, outdent, horizontal rule, hyperlinks, and spell check. More information is available in our Telerik RadEditor Overview.
Please note that all wiki discussion board content prior to the upgrade has been migrated to the new format.
The CodePlex team will be at the MVP Summit - Communities Side Session at the Sheraton on Thursday afternoon. We're hoping that all MVPs who use CodePlex will be able to swing by for some CodePlex swag, new feature demos, and feature suggestions.
Contact me for more information.
Yesterday, we deployed our latest CodePlex feature – Project Stats Pages. These project stats pages provide details for downloads, page views, visits, and referrals over the project lifetime. Additionally, the project’s stats can be viewed in weekly, monthly, and yearly segments. Visit any CodePlex project to check out the new stats pages, or go to the Stats FAQ for more information.
We display the stats data using the Telerik RadChart, and we obtain page views, visits, and referrals from WebTrends.
Breakdown of stats available for each project:
· Downloads - downloads includes all publicly available releases, source code changesets, and wiki attachments
· Page Views - page views indicate the total number of views on any page on the project
· Visits - a visit is a series of one or more page views from the same browser within a short timeframe
· Referrals – the list of referring sites
For example, using the xUnit project, here’s what the stats look like for the month of February. In the graph below, there were 273 page views on Feb 15, 2008.
Enjoy!
The CodePlex team is proud to announce our partnership with the DotNetNuke corporation for their
DotNetNuke Forge launch. The DotNetNuke Forge is a premier destination for open source collaboration on the DotNetNuke platform, with CodePlex as the project hosting site. You can read more about the launch in the
DotNetNuke Forge press release.
Start by browsing the current list of projects in the
DotNetNuke Forge Directory. If you want to join, or already have a CodePlex project for DotNetNuke you want added, check out the
FAQ at the bottom.
At CodeMash 2008, I had an incredible opportunity to meet 1-1 with many various users of CodePlex, from those who run projects to those who download them. Thanks to everyone for their valuable input and making the time to discuss their ideas with me. I had an awesome time, and will always try to do an open space at every conference I go to from now on.
Instead of just posting the feedback I received, our dev lead Jonathan suggested I enter work items for everyone to vote on. So…
Without further ado, here’s what I’ve entered based on our conversations at CodeMash for you to vote on. Of course, please vote on whatever else you find interesting in the feature wish list.
We have job openings for developers to join the CodePlex team! If you would be interested in helping us continue to improve CodePlex to make it an outstanding open source project hosting site then check out this link:
http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=F7F6CE4D-17D4-4098-B3DD-D70EBE7A52F2
Sara Ford, our CodePlex Program Manager, recently appeared on .NET Rocks episode #296 which featured an open source panel discussion held at the DevTeach developer conference in Vancouver, BC. Sara Ford and three other panelists discuss open source and respond to questions from the audience.
Go to .NET Rocks episode #296 to listen to the recording.
As announced this week, two licenses from Microsoft, the Microsoft Public License (previously known as the Microsoft Permissive License) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (previously known as the Microsoft Community License), were approved by the Open Source Initiative. These licenses are now available on CodePlex.
If you are an existing project owner and wish to use the new license name, go to the License tab, select Change License, and choose the desired license from the drop down list.
Do you have a passion for open source and want to help shape the direction of the CodePlex project? Do you love delivering customer-focused products? Interested in working with a small, high performance team in an agile environment? If so, then maybe you should be the
CodePlex Program Manager! :)
We have published the SvnBridge project at http://www.codeplex.com/SvnBridge
SvnBridge is designed to allow using TortoiseSVN with Team Foundation Server. It works by emulating a Subversion server and converting the calls to the TFS API. SvnBridge works as a task tray application that you run on your developer workstation and pointing it at the TFS server, and then pointing your TortoiseSVN client at the SvnBridge running on your local machine.
SvnBridge is still under active development in a early alpha stage. Please check out the project and tell us what you think!
We've finished adding patch support for CodePlex Client, and have therefore made our first official release (June 2007).
You can download it here. In addition to supporting patch, this release is the first to be offered as stand-alone single executables (cpc.exe/tfc.exe) without any DLL dependencies. If you are using an older version of CodePlex Client, you should remove all the executables and DLLs before updating to the June 2007 Release.
In addition to releasing the client, we've written some instructions on how to use the patch features to contribute (and accept contributions) on CodePlex projects.
The CodePlex Client team is going to be on a bit of a hiatus. If there are show-stopper bugs we'll get them fixed ASAP, but there will be no new feature development for a while. We are hoping that now that patch is ready, we'll be able to take community contributions. If you'd like to contribute, please contact me.
The number one new feature request from users is for CodePlex to support Subversion. Specifically what users are telling us they want is the features and experience they get when using TortoiseSVN as a source control client. It is important to us on the CodePlex team to provide our users the features they want and need to have the best experience possible, and so we will soon be offering support for using TortoiseSVN with CodePlex.
Our release date for offering TortoiseSVN support is June 18th. Note that this is a revised date from June 5th to give additional time for development and testing.
We plan to offer TortoiseSVN support by creating a “bridge” that emulates a Subversion server and converts the requests from TortoiseSVN into calls to Team Foundation Server. We want to offer users the ability to use the source control tools of their choice with the most flexibility possible, and we chose this approach because it offers the following benefits:
- Users can choose to use either TortoiseSVN, the CodePlex Client, Teamprise Explorer, or Visual Studio Team Explorer with any project
- All existing and new projects will immediately support using TortoiseSVN as a source control client
- Existing projects will not need to go through any type of migration to support TortoiseSVN
- New projects do not have to choose what source control clients they will support since all clients will automatically be supported
We will be releasing the “bridge” software as an open source project on CodePlex.
We just released beta 2 of the CodePlex Client. This release includes a number of notable features:
Anonymous Access
We shipped the server-side piece of anonymous access during last Monday's CodePlex deployment. Today's Beta 2 CodePlex Client (cpc.exe) release allows anybody to get read-only access to the source code of any project on the CodePlex site.
Yeah, anybody. No, you don't need to be a developer or coordinator. You don't even need a CodePlex web site account! Just download the beta 2 client and go. :) (You might want to read the installation and workflow wiki pages first.)
Team Foundation Client (tfc.exe)
Beta 2 marks the first time we've publicly shipped tfc.exe. This command line application is nearly identical to cpc.exe except that it will work against arbitrary TFS servers.
The key differences are:
- cpc.exe can check out based on as project name; tfc.exe checkout requires a TFS server URL and server path.
- cpc.exe can take your CodePlex username and turn it into the TFS username; tfc.exe does not change your credentials in any way.
- cpc.exe can be used for anonymous access to the CodePlex TFS servers; tfc.exe cannot.
- tfc.exe will automatically send your logged in user credentials to the TFS server; cpc.exe will not.
Because of the way cpc.exe/tfc.exe work, there may be performance issues on extremely large projects (10s or 100s of thousands of files). Very large projects should consider use Team Explorer or Teamprise instead.
Configuration via Environment Variables
In addition to configuring cpc.exe and tfc.exe through their .config files, you can also configure via environment variables. This is better suited for UAC on Vista as well as multi-user scenarios. For more informaiton, see the configuration wiki.
Source Code
A couple weeks ago we made the CodePlex Client its own project on the CodePlex site, including using it as our live source control server.
This morning we just published a CodePlex project for our source control client. We've released the source code under the Microsoft Permissive License. The source code is already available, and the internal and external issues have been moved to the public Issue Tracker.
In addition to cpc.exe, we've also included a utility called tfc.exe, which works against arbitrary TFS servers. In the Beta 2 release of the client we will be publishing binaries for both cpc.exe and tfc.exe. The Beta 2 release will also enable the ability for cpc.exe users to get anonymous access to the source code of any project on the system, thereby closing a long-standing CodePlex feature request.
We have 110 user votes covered in this deployment, plus a whole bucket-full of tweaks, bug fixes, and little improvements. Here are a few of the changes:
- The default font for the site is now Segoe UI. I think it looks much more streamlined as a result. (Segoe UI ships with Vista and Office 2007. We fall back to some more common fonts if you don't have it.)
- The license editor now offers a drop-down list with 10 popular choices (including 2 Microsoft Shared Source licenses). A "custom license" choice is still available, though I suspect that those 10 license will easily cover 95% of the license choices people make. No more copy & paste! :)
- We replaced the "Similar Projects" box (with it's not so great algorithm) with a "Related Projects" box. Coordinators can now explicitly choose which projects should be shown in this box.
- The releases page got some visual tweaks (a key for the work item icons, some nicer graphics for files, etc.)
- The individual people pages (f.e., mine) got some working over, including an activity tracker that shows you the things that person has done in the last 60 days.
- Issue Tracker advanced view got memory! It will remember your last few keyword searches now.
- The Source Control tab now contains information about the 3 predominant source control clients (visible to developers and coordinators).