News
End is Nigh for CodePlex, Visual Studio 2008
Two wholly unrelated end-of-life events are on the horizon, one for the once-popular CodePlex source code sharing site built by Microsoft, and the other for a waning Visual Studio 2008.
- By Michael Domingo
- 04/13/2017
Microsoft's developer teams announced two wholly unrelated end-of-life events. The first is that the once-popular CodePlex source code repository built by Microsoft will be winding down in the face of more popular repositories, and the second is the end of support for Visual Studio 2008, coming next year.
CodePlex was originally launched in 2006 as Microsoft started warming to the idea of sharing its development projects with the open source community. And it was popular for a time among developers working within the Microsoft stack, but more popular options like GitHub have since overtaken it.
"Over the past few years, we've watched many CodePlex projects migrate," writes Microsoft's Brian Harry, in a blog post. "During the same period, we've had to address several issues, including a spam epidemic over several months in 2015, as spammers sought to take advantage of the CodePlex.com domain to boost their illicit activities. We've also seen a substantial decrease in usage: as of this writing, less than 350 projects saw a source code commit in the last 30 days."
Harry notes that currently, CodePlex no longer allows projects to be added to it, and the plan is to make it a read-only site by October, before completely shuttering it mid-December.
For developers, that means that any projects residing there are still accessible, but Harry says that those projects should start to be migrated over to other repositories, like GitHub, which is what Harry calls Microsoft's "de facto for open source sharing."
As for Visual Studio 2008, the end was expected, and the announcement was more formal and based on a software support policy that has been in place for well over at least the last decade now.
"In line with our ten-year support policy, Visual Studio 2008, its associated products, runtimes, and components will cease to be supported from April 10, 2018," according to a blog post from Deniz Duncan, a Visual Studio Program Manager based in Australia. All versions of Visual Studio 2008 and ancillary services like Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, will stop being supported. Of course, Microsoft recommends that companies who have VS 2008 in place should upgrade as soon as possible.
Lifecycle support for all Microsoft products and services can be searched on this Microsoft Support page.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.