A few months ago, Microsoft announced plans to shut down CodePlex. The site will be moving into read-only mode by October.

I was an early adopter of CodePlex and had 14 projects hosted there. It had been obvious for several years that CodePlex was slowly dying and it’s been over two years since I moved NAudio over to GitHub, a move that made a lot of sense.

But I needed to make a decision about the other projects I had on CodePlex. One of them, Skype Voice Changer, was in fact my greatest ever hit, having been downloaded over 3 million times (and went on to have an interesting journey of its own)! Many of my other projects were simple audio utilities or games, and I also made quite a few custom Silverlight controls. Obviously most of these projects are effectively obsolete now.

However, CodePlex kindly provided a way to easily import your projects into GitHub, and it wasn’t even too hard to bring along the documentation/wiki as well. So I’ve imported most of them into GitHub and turned the documentation into markdown files. Despite the fact that these are mostly dead/done projects, they do contain a bunch of XAML and audio related code snippets that may still be of benefit to someone in the future so I’m glad they can live on at GitHub.

So the only thing that remains is to say thank you to everyone who worked on CodePlex. The decision to shut it down makes sense, but I am grateful for the service it provided me over the past decade. A few things I’m thankful for…

  • When it launched, it was the best and easiest place to host .NET open source projects (I’d previously failed miserably to host an early version NAudio on sourceforge with CVS)
  • It introduced me to distributed version control thanks to adding Mercurial support
  • I made connections with several outstanding open source developers
  • The Developer Media ads were a small but welcome financial return on the time spent creating open source software
  • ClickOnce hosting and the ability to embed Silverlight apps in your docs were nice touches that other project hosting sites didn’t offer
  • Providing an easy mechanism to migrate my source code and docs away to GitHub (hopefully the discussion and issues will also be exportable soon too).

So goodbye CodePlex, and thanks for being part of my journey as an open source developer.