CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past calendar year. Visits to the Website more than doubled to top 19-million in 2008, while new registered users were up more than 70 percent to over 66,000 and the number of new projects more than doubled to 4,542 over the year.
That brings the grand CodePlex total to more than 120,000 registered users and 7,500 projects.
According to a blog by Sara Ford, the Program Manager for CodePlex, there were 12 new releases of the CodePlex software over the year, with new features including Subversion client support; an upgraded UI; Silverlight hosting; an AJAX Source code browser; and Search improvements.
The top five Open Source projects created in 2008, by page view count, were WPF, the main site for updates on the WPF roadmap and the portal for accessing the WPF Toolkit and the WPF Futures releases; the Silverlight Toolkit, a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle; the CompositeWPF, designed to help users more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight client applications; MVCSamples, prototype and sample ASP.NET MVC Sample applications; and the Unity Application Block, a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.
Also, earlier this month, DotNetNuke Corporation, the creator of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, decided to leverage the CodePlex infrastructure for its core product distribution. DotNetNuke said it would utilize CodePlex for download infrastructure, bandwidth, and metrics reporting for its core product offerings. Until now, DotNetNuke had been leveraging services from SourceForge.Net.
So, what's next you may ask? Well, Sara and the team are eagerly waiting for your feedback and suggestions.