CodePlex

Microsoft's open source home, closed because GitHub won

Shut down
19902026

CodePlex was Microsoft's open source project hosting site, launched in 2006 with wikis, issue tracking and version control. It added Mercurial in 2010 and Git in 2012. By 2017 fewer than 350 projects on it had a commit in a month, and Microsoft closed it and moved to GitHub, which it bought the following year.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2006
  2. May 2006 Launch
    CodePlex enters beta

    A Microsoft-run home for open source projects.

  3. 2010
  4. 22 January 2010 Feature
    Mercurial support

    Distributed version control arrives, four years in.

  5. 2012
  6. 21 March 2012 Feature
    Git support
  7. 2017
  8. 31 March 2017 Shutdown announced
    Fewer than 350 active projects

    Brian Harry publishes the numbers alongside the closure notice.

  9. 15 December 2017 Shutdown
    CodePlex closes

    Published as a read-only archive, with migration tooling to GitHub.

  10. 2018
  11. 4 June 2018 Acquisition
    Microsoft buys GitHub

    $7.5 billion, eighteen months after closing its own forge.

The site through time

Browse codeplex.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Microsoft 2006–2017 Founded Solely owned and run by Microsoft throughout

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts 350 March 2017 Confirmed Projects with a commit in the previous 30 days, per Microsoft

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Brian Harry announced the closure on 31 March 2017, writing that CodePlex had fewer than 350 projects with a commit in the previous 30 days while GitHub had millions. The site closed on 15 December 2017 and was published as a read-only archive.

Our analysis: CodePlex was built when Microsoft was still uneasy about open source and wanted its own place for it. By the time Microsoft had genuinely changed its mind, the industry had already standardised on GitHub, and running a second forge for a few hundred active projects made no sense.

History [edit]

A forge of one's own

CodePlex went into beta in May 2006 and released a month later. It offered wiki pages, discussion forums, issue tracking, releases, statistics and version control, and it was where Microsoft-adjacent open source lived: .NET and ASP.NET projects, SharePoint tools, and the AJAX Control Toolkit, which was a genuine collaboration between Microsoft and outside contributors.

It also tracked the industry, slowly. Team Foundation version control at the start, then Subversion, then Mercurial in January 2010, then Git in March 2012. Each addition arrived after the argument it settled had already been won elsewhere.

Fewer than 350

On 31 March 2017 Brian Harry, a Microsoft technical fellow, published the closure notice, and it contained the number that explained everything. In the previous thirty days, fewer than 350 projects on CodePlex had received a commit. GitHub, in the same period, had millions.

Harry was direct about the reason. Open source development had consolidated on one place, that place was not CodePlex, and Microsoft's own teams had already moved.

Archived, not deleted

CodePlex closed on 15 December 2017. Microsoft did the decent thing and published the whole site as a read-only archive, so links kept resolving and code stayed reachable rather than disappearing. It also provided migration tooling to move projects to GitHub.

Eighteen months after announcing that developers had all moved to GitHub, Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Shutting down CodePlex Brian Harry, Microsoft 31 March 2017 [archived]
  2. Microsoft takes CodePlex to death row on back of GitHub monoculture ZDNet 3 April 2017 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).