Friday, June 16, 2006

msdnman Moves To CodePlex

Now that msdnman is public, I need to find a home for it that isn't two zipfiles in a directory somewhere. I said I was going to move it to SourceForge, but Brad Wilson suggested that I host it at CodePlex instead. So I did: msdnman lives here now.

 

CodePlex is part Microsoft's answer to SourceForge, part spiritual successor to GotDotNet. As you know, I was pretty a pretty vocal detractor of GotDotNet, but that's exactly why I wanted to try out CodePlex - I wanted to see if Microsoft had gotten it right this time.

 

Well, I'd say they're on the right track. Having worked with CodePlex for all of two days now, I'm reasonably impressed. To start with, it has a real source control system - TFS. Aspects of the command-line support are slightly annoying (the need to constantly reauthenticate, specifically), but it's a totally modern tool, with support for lots of interesting and useful features (e.g. shelving). Other touches of the site - wiki editing for the project's home page, export of work items to Excel, linking checkins to work items, etc. - are really nice, and a step above what SourceForge provides.

 

My only major complaint is that there's no email support on the site right now. I believe email to be the lifeblood of open source projects. It's certainly how I do everything. Right now CodePlex uses RSS, which I think will serve well enough until email is available (it's on their list).

 

All in all, CodePlex is a pretty good effort for a v1 release. I expect it will improve rapidly, too, given that they have people like Brad and Jim Newkirk (of NUnit fame) on the team.

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