Microsoft's Open Source Repository a Smashing Success

Microsoft's open source project repository has been a smashing success considering the statistics associated with the website for 2008. CodePlex, designed to streamline the building of an open source project community by offering free hosting and the adjacent sharing and collaboration infrastructure, enjoyed a consistent growth in terms of traffic over the past year. With the exception of registered users, which grew only by 72% to 66,553, all the other metrics for the software giant's open source project-hosting website have increased over 100% the past year, compared to 2007.

Up +119%, the number of visits jumped to 19,5 million in 2008, compared to just 8,8 million the previous year. At the same time, the number of uniques visitors also doubled. The 4,5million unique visitors in 2007 jumped over 116%, to more than 9,8 million in 2008. The added traffic is also representative of the increase in the volume of projects hosted by CodePlex. In 2008, a total of 4,542 new projects were hosted on CodePlex, up 113% from 2,130 in 2007.

Sara Ford, CodePlex program manager, revealed that “Over 2008, we had 12 new releases of the CodePlex software, with the following top 9 features:

- Subversion client support – server hosted SVN Bridge allowing SVN clients to 'just work' against the CodePlex TFS servers;

- Site redesign – new look and feel, upgraded UI. The end of the nuclear waste green era;

- Silverlight hosting – okay, technically not deployed within 2008, but who’s counting =D;

- Project statistics – see daily statistics of page views, downloads, and visits;

- Ratings and reviews – rate and review project releases;

- Project Discussions mailing lists – get notifications and discuss projects via e-mail alongside the online discussion boards;

- AJAX Source code browser – easily browse source code before download with file tree view and source code syntax highlighting;

- Search improvements – added sort by relevance or ratings, search by development status or license type, and search term highlighting;

- Discussions rich text editor – write Discussions posts using a WYSIWYG editor.”