WikiPlex is a wiki engine designed to integrate seamlessly into applications build with the .NET framework. Furthermore, it is none other than the wiki engine that Microsoft is using for its Cloud-based repository of open source projects, CodePlex. In this regard, developers that want to leverage CodePlex's wiki engine with their own applications can do so with no problems, since WikiPlex has been made available for download for free.

“CodePlex previously had a decent wiki engine that was written eon's ago. On the average, that wiki engine worked relatively well, but had a very problematic performance bug that would cause rendering slowness occasionally. So, instead of attempting to fix the bug, we decided to re-write the entire thing with the intentions of making it available to everyone! This time, we chose a different approach for parsing the wiki markup (utilizing regular expressions) which has proven to give us a performance boost as well as a relatively simpler architecture,” Microsoft Developer Matt Hawley revealed.

Not only has Microsoft rewritten WikiPlex, but it has also made it available to developers under the MS-PL (Microsoft Public License), one of the company's open source licenses. As of mid-July 2009, version 1.0.0.104 can be accessed via CodePlex. Hawley indicated that the wiki engine had been built to allow developers to easily add it to their .NET infrastructures. One advantage that WikiPlex delivers to third-party projects is the fact that the engine has been extensively tested on CodePlex, a repository that hosts over 10,000 projects.

“The main question you may be asking yourself is – Why use WikiPlex over a different solution? Here's the simple answer: WikiPlex is great if you already have a .NET application you'd like to embed a wiki interface into. Be it as simple as allowing users to host their own homepage content, item descriptions, or comments – the possibilities are endless,” Hawley explained.