CodePlex Weblog

The times they are a changing...

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:47:00 GMT

It was 4½ years ago that Sandy Khaund and I founded the group that was chartered to build an open source project hosting site for Microsoft. The site, which eventually became known as CodePlex (it had many internal names) launched a little more than a year later. The site has grown dramatically over the past 3 years and today is one of the largest open source project hosting sites. It also hosts 400+ of Microsoft’s own open source projects. In addition CodePlex serves as an example of how to run an agile project at Microsoft. The team that was formed to build and support the site has been one of the best teams that I have worked with over the years.

I say all this because today is my last day as the Product Unit Manager of the CodePlex team. I decided a month ago to move to a new opportunity in Microsoft Services organization. I will be leading a development team that is responsible for building solutions which assist customers in deploying, maintaining, operating, and developing applications for Microsoft’s products. However, this does not end my efforts with regard to Microsoft and open source. I am an advisor to the CodePlex Foundation, a coordinator on the xUnit.net project, and a very interested observer of CodePlex (hint: cool and interesting things are coming). I know they will keep up the great work.

Behind the scenes in the CodePlex Team Room with Scott Hanselman

saraford — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:43:00 GMT

Last week, Scott Hanselman stopped by the CodePlex team room to film a behind the scenes look at how we build the CodePlex.com software.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Glucose/Hanselminutes-on-9-Inside-CodePlexcom/

Enjoy!

Introducing the Documentation tab for CodePlex projects

saraford — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:47:00 GMT

Yesterday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.

We’re excited to introduce our latest feature, the Documentation tab. CodePlex users now have a consistent place across projects to find documentation, while project owners are encouraged to write documentation, either by themselves or with the help of an Editor.

Why a Documentation Tab?

We introduced the documentation tab for the following reasons:

Consistency across Projects – The #1 feature request from the most dissatisfied users is the need for a consistent place to find documentation across projects.
Encourage writing of documentation - I believe that providing a documentation tab will encourage project owners to write documentation, especially with the help of the Editor role.

What if I already have documentation on my wiki?

If you already had a wiki page titled “Documentation”, we’ve migrated this for you under the Documentation tab.

You can migrate other wiki pages to the Documentation tab by editing the page and clicking on the “move to documentation” link, once you have made your Documentation tab publicly visible (see more on that below). We will move any child pages and any attachments.

How to show System Requirements?

The documentation page now has a section to display System Requirements on the right-hand side.

Why do only some of the projects show a Documentation tab?

We felt it was important to clearly indicate whether a project is providing documentation under this tab. In the event that the project owner isn’t using this tab, we decided to hide the tab from the public. We want to avoid users visiting the documentation tab only to find no content.

What does the Documentation tab look like by default to project owners?

To encourage documentation writing, we indicate to the project owner that the Documentation tab is current hidden and provide suggestions on what should be included in this section.

What happened to the Stats tab?

Our most popular monitor size is 1024x768. At this resolution, we’ve run out of space for tabs. After spending lots of time on future designs and doing lots of analysis on clickthroughs on many of our projects, we decided to associated the stats page with the stats we report on the homepage.

Where can I see an example?

You can visit my pet project Stick Figure Karate Fighter, where I created the documentation tab on stage during last night’s Southwest Fox keynote.

The CodePlex Jump – Trip Report from TechEd Australia and New Zealand

saraford — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:44:28 GMT

Last month, I had the opportunity to fulfill my childhood dream of going to Australia to speak at Microsoft TechEd. However, little did I know this trip to the Southern Hemisphere would take me to new heights at TechEd New Zealand.

The link to the full version is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcc4KRrZpI0

Special thanks to Sky Jump! for lettings us film and TechEd Online New Zealand for making the jump happen and for putting the full edited video together.

Photos from the Southern Hemisphere

Above: CodePlex overlooking the Gold Coast and the Convention Center in Queensland, Australia

Above: “A Tour of CodePlex” TechEd Australia attendee after the breakout session

Above: TechEd Australia attendee proudly displays his support of CodePlex on his HP Mini notebook. TechEd Australia attendees received a HP Mini notebook running Windows 7.

Above: CodePlex at the Australia Zoo, home of the Crocodile Hunter.

Above: Me just a few seconds before I screamed “Go CodePlex” louder than I ever thought humanly possible

Looking for Seattle-area participants for CodePlex Usability Study

saraford — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:26:45 GMT

We will be conducting in-person usability studies for CodePlex.com in Seattle, Washington on October 13 and 14, 2009. We are looking for project owners on CodePlex to participate in the one hour usability study. Whether you own one project or multiple projects, your feedback will help us create a better CodePlex site.

Interested in participating? Contact us and include your:

Current level of involvement in CodePlex
CodePlex username (if you have one)
Phone number where we can contact you to schedule a time

You will be reimbursed $100 for your time.

Cheers!

- The CodePlex Team

CodePlex Interview on Channel 9

saraford — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:53:00 GMT

The Channel 9 team met with Sara Ford to go over the state of CodePlex, where the site has been and where it is heading to.

Link to video: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/NicFill/A-chat-with-Sara-Ford-CodePlex-turns-3-reaches-10000-projects/

Work Item Notifications and Recommended Download

saraford — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:52:34 GMT

Yesterday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.

Work Item Notifications

As of today, our #2 most requested feature asked for the ability to receive email notifications for work items. Back in April, we introduced the ability to receive email notifications per individual work items. Now, users can subscribe to receive email at the project level.

On the Issue Tracker, you’ll notice the Issue Notification feature in the right nav bar.

You can opt in to receive email as issues come in or in a daily digest form.

You can also configure your email notifications across all projects when you edit your profile.

Recommended Default Download

All projects now feature a Download Now button on their homepage. This is to help users download software as easily and quickly as possible.

Every release now features a Recommended Download. Pressing the Download Now button will download the Recommended Download for the Default Release.

To introduce the feature, we selected the most downloaded file per release and marked that as the recommended download. If we got it wrong and you as a project owner want people to download a different file as the recommended download, just edit the Release and choose the right download.

Special thanks to Ross Turk over at SourceForge for all the advice in how to implement the recommended download concept!

Donate Ad Revenue To Charity and New Editor Role

saraford — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:30:43 GMT

Yesterday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.

Donate your advertisement revenue to charity

By clicking just 2 check boxes, any project owner can donate their ad revenues to Habitat for Humanity Int’l. My thinking is even if an individual project only receives a dollar in ad revenue each month, if thousands of projects opt in to donate their ad revenue, that’s a pretty decent size donation.

We’ll report donations on a monthly basis in our documentation.

Editor Role

We introduced a new CodePlex Editor role where this team member can only modify the wiki, for example, no write access to source code repository, no access to edit work item details, etc.

My hope is this will give the CodePlex community more ways to contribute to open source projects, especially in writing documentation for projects.

Editing your own work items

We’ve added the ability for you to edit your own work item content, in case you’ve made a typo or need to update steps to reproduce an issue.

Our Wiki Engine is now available as a project on CodePlex

saraford — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:58:00 GMT

On Thursday last week, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.

Introducing the release of WikiPlex

WikiPlex, our wiki engine, is now available as an open source project on CodePlex under the Microsoft Public License at http://wikiplex.codeplex.com/. You can read more about WikiPlex on our developer Matt Hawley’s blog at WikiPlex – An Embedded Wiki Engine

Reply with Quotes

In the discussion boards, we’ve added the ability to reply with quoted text.

This will put the post you are replying to in quotes for you.

New Wiki Macros

Alongside the release of WikiPlex, we added a couple of new macros that allows you to right align and left align text and images.

>{This content will be right aligned}>
<{This content will be left aligned}<

<[image:codeplex_logo_green_small.jpg] The image will be right aligned
>[image:codeplex_logo_green_small.jpg] The image will be right aligned

For example,

CodePlex Turns 3 years old; Breaks the 10,000 project mark

saraford — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:00:00 GMT

On Saturday, July 4, 2009 at 2pm, CodePlex surpassed the 10,000 project mark just shortly after our 3 year anniversary. Congrats to SharpFitter, a Visual Studio 2008 C# Add-in that dynamically loads plug-ins, for being our 10,000th project.

We hope to see this incredible rate of growth continue to bring more open source development to the Windows platform.

Check out the Port 25 post for more coverage on what’s been happening on CodePlex.

CodePlex Statistics

Below, you can see the upward trend of new projects each month over the past few years.

When people ask me why CodePlex has such great traffic growth, I say it is because of the quality of our projects. Happy project owners = Happy users and site visitors. Our overall site traffic stats reflect this upward growth trend as well. In fact, this will be our 7^th consecutive month of record breaking traffic.

It was recently in the news that the MS-PL is now in the top ten of OSI license usage. Here’s a breakdown of which licenses we’re hosting.

Along with 10,000 projects comes a lot of source code, approximately 160 million lines hosted across 10 Team Foundation Servers.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 7 file types we’re hosting.

Special thanks to all our project owners and our users for making CodePlex a success!

My Favorite Projects, New Profile Pages, and a Source Code Diff tool

saraford — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:03:23 GMT

Today we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software. We’re excited to bring you several new features in this deployment.

My Favorite Projects

Our #2 most requested feature is Favorite Projects, where users can mark a project as a favorite

and have it appear on their profile page.

The comments in the Favorites Project feature request suggest adding a RSS feed for the favorite projects list. Let me know what sort of activity you are interested in receiving via RSS regarding your favorite projects.

New Profile Pages

You may have noticed from the above picture that the profile pages look a little different. In order to add the My Favorite Projects feature and to finish up the Work Item Email Notifications feature, we needed to redesign the profile pages. The most notable design change to the profile pages is separating the “public view” from the “edit your info” page.

Let us know what you think of the new profile pages.

Source Code Diff Tools (Beta)

Finally, in this deployment, we’re introducing new feature that’s in “Beta” right now.

It’s your standard file diff’ing tool that’s available at the file level of each changeset.

I know it is much more interesting to see at the changeset level which files have been changed, and then drill down into how those files have been changed. However, living the agile life, I wanted to first get the basic ability to diff files out there to collect feedback on it.

Looking for a charity for CodePlex project owners to donate advertisement revenue

saraford — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:05:52 GMT

One of the things we’ve been planning to do with The Lounge as our new advertisement provider is to allow project owners with a single click to opt in to have their advertisement revenue go to charity. We believe that pooling individual projects together would provide a nice charitable donation.

However, we haven’t been able to finalize on a charity yet. We’re thinking maybe a non-profit that’s focused on Open Source or education in IT? But maybe people would prefer a charity like Habitat for Humanity? We wanted to get your input what charities come to mind that we should check out.

CodePlex now supports projects hosting ads from The Lounge (and lots of other great new features too!)

saraford — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:15:00 GMT

Today we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.

Use Advertisements from The Lounge

With a single click, CodePlex project owners can now host advertisements on their project pages from The Lounge.

Project owner can see advertisements appear on the Home tab, the Downloads tab, the Discussions tab, and the Issue Tracker.

You can visit the CodePlex documentation for more information on hosting advertisements from The Lounge.

Insert Code Snippet in Discussions

We’ve heard your feedback. You can now insert a code snippet into a discussion post via the Insert Code Snippet button.

This will display a window for you to post in your code and to preview with syntax highlighting.

Browse / Download Latest in Source Control

In this deployment, we’ve updated the Source Code tab to bring you the browse or download the latest version.

RSS Feed Updates

Again, we’ve heard your feedback. We’ve tweaked the CodePlex site RSS feed based on your feedback. New Projects and New Releases are listed first with their descriptions, whereas most popular and most downloaded are listed at the bottom.

Since we just deployed today, you’ll have to wait for the next RSS update (anytime after noon PST tomorrow).

http://www.codeplex.com/rss.ashx

New Wiki Markup Macros

and last but not least, we’ve added a few macros to the collection.

Superscript: ^^I am superscript^^

Subscript: ,,I am subscript,,

Strikethrough ~~I am strikethrough~~

Horizontal rule (4 dashes on single line)

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Will Code for Green contest

saraford — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:50:12 GMT

Developers, got a green open source app? Live Search and Gnomedex are sponsoring a Will Code for Green contest. Make the world a little better, win $10,000 + get featured at Gnomedex! Create a green open source app using the Live Search API (search results, phonebook, video, images etc.) with any tech platform or language! You can enter the contest at http://willcodeforgreen.gnomedex.com

Filter by work items that you’re tracking

saraford — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:07:00 GMT

Yesterday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software. In this release, we continued to work on the email notifications for work items feature by adding the ability to filter just by the work items you’re tracking.

We also made optimizations in our web architecture to improve server utilization for better handling the increased traffic levels.