CodePlex VS SourceForge

On June 27 (28 in Indonesian), Microsoft launches CodePlex, an online collaborative software development portal which is almost like the same as Sourceforge which exist before CodePlex. This portal was built on C# using .NET 2.0 technology with Team Foundation Server on the back end. Up to now (as i'm writing this post), there has been 48 projects that has registered to this services and it will keep growing as they become more mature each day. Some OpenSource projects has already registered also, for example "Atlas" Control Toolkit and IronPython 1.01 Beta 1.

CodePlex provides source control, issue tracking, discussion forums and RSS feeds in and out of each project so that members can stay up to date on the development issues most important to them. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server enables developers to collaboratively develop, share, discuss and consume source code and build software. Most of this features has been implemented in SourceForge and they still had a lot of features beyond CodePlex. I don't know whether CVS or SubVersion will be implemented in CodePlex in the future as it has different method with Visual Source Safe which is the main code revision tool in Microsoft's products.

One factor that become the key point to win over SF is by giving a stable and robust services, as SF often closing down their services due to an outage which always be posted in their site status page. One of the service that often being temporarily closed is the CVS Service. Once, they had a major crash on their storage and finally they did a major infrastructure upgrade that makes developers have to reconfigure their CVS account again and re-test the repository again. Let's hope CodePlex don't have this problem also in the future (i don't think it will be happening now, as the project is still relatively small, except when the server is being DDOS'ed or hacked)