CodePlex: A Microsoft way of sharing |
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By Mike Gunderloy, Contributor
19 May 2006 | SearchVB.com |
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Surely most developers know about SourceForge.net, the community
site that hosts upwards of 120,000 open source software projects,
providing CVS or Subversion source-code control, discussion
boards, bug-tracking, file hosting, and other services. A while back
Microsoft attempted to invade the same space with its own GotDotNet site, "The Microsoft .NET
Framework Community."
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Looking a year down the road, I suspect what we'll see is CodePlex as the de facto release point for Microsoft open source and shared source projects.
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GotDotNet has had an extremely checkered history,
having been troubled by poor availability and general
flakiness ever since its launch. Despite heroic efforts on the part of
various Microsoft employees, GotDotNet has never quite taken off, and hosts
about 8,400 projects at the moment, with more than one high-profile
project having fled for more stable hosting.
However, as the history of Windows reminds us, Microsoft has rarely
been a company willing to be discouraged by an early debacle. They've now
launched the beta version of CodePlex, "Microsoft's community
development Web site." Written in C# and ASP.NET 2.0, with Team Foundation
Server as a backend, CodePlex is planned to be open for free to anyone who
wants to host a project (though at the moment the beta is very closed; you
need to e-mail for permission to create a new project, and judging by the
trickle of projects coming in they're controlling the load very
carefully).
CodePlex projects can have a variety of features, though no project is
required to make all of these features available:
- A project home page
- RSS-based news feeds. Oddly, you can't create a news feed in
CodePlex; rather, the news feed page of a project displays RSS consumed
from some other source.
- Discussions, hosted in a fairly basic Web forum format.
- Releases, where you can download the actual software. This
includes change logs showing the work items that were included in a
release.
- Issue tracking.
- Source code control.
- Project member tracking.
- License management, including requiring click-through licenses to
download.
The CodePlex site itself has launched much more smoothly than GotDotNet
did; the navigation is smooth, the screens look good in both IE and
Firefox, the bugs are pretty minimal. Keeping the gates largely barred has
resulted in a responsive server, as well, so people aren't complaining
about lag times or failed downloads. There are many features missing
when you compare CodePlex to more mature communities, from RSS feed
generation to customizable discussion boards, but presumably those can
be added in time. The real question is whether this will
end up being the sort of community that its designers are obviously hoping
for.
It seems clear that there is one huge early hurdle to CodePlex's wide adoption: the requirement to have a Team Foundation Server client to make full use of source code control and work item tracking services. Microsoft is making such a client available for free; you can download the Visual Studio Team Explorer client and install it as either a Visual Studio add-in or a standalone
application. But it requires a minimum of 512 KB of RAM and 8 GB of hard
drive space, which will knock many older computers out of the running.
There is a command-line client as well, but it's part of the same package.
CodePlex is already hosting a project, "Turtle," that plans to produce an
alternative client - but right at the moment, this is vaporware.
Don't write off CodePlex entirely, though. Microsoft has already put
some of its own code up for grabs, including the "MSBee" toolkit for
building .NET 1.1 projects under MSBuild, the Managed Stack Explorer power
toy, and the Team Foundation Server administration tool. And a few other
projects have shown up to join them. Looking a year down the road, I
suspect what we'll see is CodePlex as the de facto release point for
Microsoft open source and shared source projects, as well as the home to
.NET community projects aimed at serious developers with high-end
machines. But the barriers to entry are likely, I think, to limit the
number of projects on CodePlex. In the end, Team Foundation Server is not
going to take the wider coding community by storm.
Mike Gunderloy is the Senior Technology Partner for Adaptive Strategy, a
Washington State consulting firm. You can read more of
Mike's work at his Larkware Web site, or
contact him at MikeG1@larkfarm.com.
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