CodePlex

I’ve been head down these past few weeks working on a customer deployment and on some internal business planning deliverables, and finally logged into NewsGator to catch up on some reading. I came across Lawrence Liu’s post about adding a SharePoint Community Kit (SCK) to CodePlex, the just-launched Microsoft community development website. For those of you working in the Microsoft technology realm, a description from the CodePlex homepage:

Welcome to CodePlex, Microsoft’s community development Web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback.

I had heard about CodePlex a couple weeks back from Joel or someone over in the SharePoint technical marketing space, and, to reinforce Lawrence’s point, am excited to see the content growing around SharePoint.

Having participated in a similar community a few years back when my own company developed add-ons for the Rational development tool suite (my company developed tools for Rose and ClearCase – which led to books on ClearCase and ClearQuest), I am excited to see this kind of resource for MS developers. After watching much of this effort with Rational die off over the last few years due to a shift in product architecture and then the acquisition by IBM (I’m not bitter), I’m glad its something MS values and wants to expand.

Love that it works with VSTS. Love the news feeds capability that captures blogs from project participants and posts it to the community, and that you can subscribe to any of the content within the site. Very cool.