CodePlex

» see codeplex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

codeplex was the place microsoft hosted its own open-source projects before microsoft bought github. it launched in beta in may 2006 and went public on june 27 of the same year. brian harry's team at microsoft developer division ran it. sara ford was the community manager for years. it was a forge in the sourceforge sense, with wiki pages, issue tracking, discussion forums, releases and source control. the early version control story was tfvc and mercurial. git came later.

i knew codeplex existed but i did not host anything on it. by the late 2000s when i was looking for open-source code my reflexes had already been wired to google code first and sourceforge second. codeplex sat in the part of the web that asp.net developers used by default and the rest of us drifted past. honestly, the ajax control toolkit lived there. the sharepoint community lived there. the long tail of small dotnet libraries lived there. if you were not in the microsoft stack you would maybe never type the url in.

github overtook the entire forge category between roughly 2012 and 2015. by 2016 microsoft itself was hosting its biggest open-source efforts on github (typescript, vs code, dotnet core, the linux subsystem for windows). brian harry posted the codeplex shutdown announcement on march 31 2017. the migration window ran through october 2017 when the site went read-only. on december 15 2017 the final shutdown happened. the archive of project pages and downloads stayed online until october 21 2021, almost four more years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

codeplex was a microsoft answer to sourceforge that had to grow up next to google code, both launched around the same year. the model was familiar, a project page, a source repo, a wiki, a downloads tab, a forum, an issue tracker. the difference was the source-control choice and the audience. honestly, tfvc was the default for the first few years, which made codeplex feel like a microsoft-team-foundation-server install with a public web ui. mercurial got added in 2010, git came in 2012, which was already late.

in those days. the dotnet-shaped projects that lived on codeplex were the ones microsoft sort of wanted to promote without putting them inside windows itself. the ajax control toolkit was the headline example, an asp.net library microsoft engineers worked on together with the community. the asp.net mvc preview drops lived there for a stretch. there were also smaller things like ironpython releases, ironruby, msbuild extensions, sharepoint webparts, lots of utilities you would find by typing them into the codeplex search bar and nowhere else (close enough).

~ how it ended ~

the killshot was github. by 2014 the dotnet community had already mostly migrated. microsoft's own org page on github became the canonical place for everything microsoft was doing in the open. codeplex was left running the older projects, the orphans whose maintainers had drifted off to other jobs. spam started winning the moderation fight. brian harry's announcement post was honest about it, "fewer than 350 projects seeing a source code commit over the last 30 days."

the migration tool microsoft built was solid. it exported a codeplex project to github with the wiki, the issues, the source history mostly intact. people who cared moved their work. the rest of the long tail got mirrored read-only and then sat there as a static archive. the actual december 15 2017 cutoff was uneventful in the press, a planned wind-down rather than a sudden death. the four-year archive period through october 2021 was the longest dignified sunset in microsoft developer-platform history.

~ what survived ~

codeplex left a model for shutting down a forge gracefully. the migration tool, the read-only archive period, the open communication about why it was ending. compared with google code's earlier shutdown, which microsoft staff sometimes referenced as a contrast, codeplex got to go out on a planned timeline rather than a rushed one.

it also left a generation of dotnet open source projects with a clean lineage that runs codeplex (2006-2017) then github (2014-present). if you dig into the commit history of a long-running asp.net library today, the early commits sometimes still have codeplex urls in the changelog messages. the urls themselves do not resolve anymore. they are just text now.

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