Although Microsoft and open source are two items situated by default at the opposite poles of the software environment, the Redmond company is increasingly breaking down the boundaries associated with its proprietary business model. The software giant's open source project hosting website is drawing in in excess of 1 million visitors a month, according to S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division. This, while CodePlex is barely two years old. In fact, the CodePlex team celebrated the two year anniversary of the portal on June 27, 2008.

"It seems like only recently, but is has been two years since we launched CodePlex. We launched this in Summer 2006 as Microsoft's open source project hosting site. Our goal was, and continues to be, to provide developers with the ability to collaborate on open source projects using the tools they are most familiar with. Since launching, CodePlex has grown steadily, recently achieving two major milestones: 1,000,000 unique visitors/month and 5,000 total projects," Somasegar noted.

CodePlex hosts a wide variety of open source projects, from a mundane Windows Vista battery Saver to the Research Development Kit (RDK) for Microsoft's non-Windows Singularity operating system, on which Midori is based. Out of over 5,000 projects currently made available on CodePlex, only 350 have been developed by Microsoft, with the rest being shared by members of the open source community.

"To give you a glimpse into some of the technology behind the site, CodePlex is built on Team Foundation Server. Specifically, seven TFS servers run more than 5,600 projects and cater to 12,000 project developers and 120,000 code check-ins," Somasegar added. "Open source developers can use the Visual Studio Team Explorer client for free with CodePlex to get the full integrated development experience. CodePlex also supports a wide range of other source control clients such as TortoiseSVN and TeamPrise to give users more flexibility and cross-platform access."