Microsoft shuts down CodePlex on December 15th, 2017
Microsoft announced yesterday that it will shut down its open-source project hosting website CodePlex on December 15, 2017.
The company launched CodePlex in 2006 as a place to "share software". CodePlex enabled anyone to create and share projects. The site offered various tools for that, including a wiki software, source control based on Mercurial, Subversion, Git discussion forums, issues tracking, RSS support, and a lot more.
While CodePlex has been the home to a wide variety of projects, its focus lay on projects using Microsoft software such as the .NET Framework or ASP.NET.
CodePlex shutting down
When you visit CodePlex right now, you see the shut down notification at the top of the site. It links to this blog post.
Reasons for shutting down CodePlex include a decrease in usage -- less than 350 projects hat a code commit in the past 30 days -- a spam epidemic in 2015, and the migration of a lot of projects to GitHub. In fact, most of Microsoft's own projects moved to GitHub as well.
Microsoft plans to shut down Codeplex on December 15th, 2017. The company will set all projects to read-only starting October 2017, and has disabled the option to create new CodePlex projects already.
A full backup of the site will be created before the shut down. Shut down means that Microsoft will decommission the existing CodePlex site and servers, and replace it with a read-only, archived copy of the site.
This means that access to source codes, downloads, documentation and more is still provided after the shut down of the site's core.
You’ll also be able to download an archive file with your project contents, all in common, transferrable formats like Markdown and JSON. Where possible, we’ll put in place redirects so that existing URLs work, or at least redirect you to the project’s new homepage on the archive.
Microsoft notes that it does not have plans currently to shut down the archive version of Codeplex.
As far as migration is concerned, the company suggests that projects migrate their data to GitHub instead. How that is done is highlighted on this wiki page on Codeplex.
Basically, what project administrators need to do is sign in to their Codeplex account and to their GitHub account, open the project they want to migrate on Codeplex, select the GitHub button on Codeplex, create a new repository on GitHub, and use the import button on the site to import the Codeplex project to GitHub.
Administrators may also download an archive file of the project. Options to migrate just the source code are provided as well.
Site note: A quick check here on Ghacks shows 123 articles that reference CodePlex in one form or the other. Most of those pages link to programs that are hosted on CodePlex.
I saw this on Friday, I just hope the project I’m working on gets ported to Github or somewhere, I only just created an account on Github last week.
Another example of why the cloud is not the place to work or play. One day it’s there. The next day it’s gone.
Every day is April Fools day.
Could have say the same thing with physical disks. There is no easy way to store information long term. At one point or another, you have to spend few weekends copying everything from floppy disks to zip disks to CDs to DVDs to external HDDs to SSD drives to… With the cloud, just upload a backup and walk away… done.
That reminds me, I still have school essays in those zip disks. The zip drive broke down, and too lazy to find a new one.
But with disks, you can always buy a usb drive. ;)
I have a usb 3.5 inch disk drive. I bought it cause I came across an old disk a few weeks ago and I was curious if it still had the info or not since it was a disk from my pascal class from the senior year of high school in 1992. It did. Unfortunately, WIndows 10 said no to running any of the program exes since they were DOS.
April fools day
They put it out in plan sight, to mock us all… CodePlex had been shut down *way* before Micro$oft’s “acquisition” of GitHub. Tax-evasion and money laundering of the transaction weighting in at BILLIONS of dollars (around $7.5 reportedly, “in stock”, right) is just a convenient bonus to the process – 2016 taking of “Xamarin” and so on – plus, it might’ve been theirs -GitHub- to begin with, who knows… And the process of what’s really going on, of what’s in the works (total machine intelligence dominance, being one of the main not-so-far-future goals, ofc., nano-manufacturing, as well), too much to cover in a comment – without sounding like a complete loon, hehe. :)
No, the announcement was made on March 31, 2017 by Microsoft.