Microsoft announced Friday that CodePlex, the company's open source project-hosting service, will be closed down.

Started in 2006, the service offered an alternative to SourceForge. It was based initially on Microsoft's Team Foundation Server source control and later added options to use Subversion, Mercurial, and Git.

At the time, there weren't a tremendous number of good options for hosting projects. SourceForge was the big one, but it always seemed light on feature development and heavy on advertising. CodePlex on the Web was much more attractive and less cluttered. The use of TFS for source control meant it also had strong integration in Visual Studio.

But these days, GitHub is the default choice for most open source projects. This applies to Microsoft, too; the company is using GitHub to host projects such as .NET and its Chakra JavaScript engine. Activity on CodePlex has declined, with fewer than 350 projects seeing code commits over the last 30 days.

Accordingly, Microsoft has decided to stop running the service. From today, new projects can no longer be created. In October, all projects will be set to read-only. On December 15, CodePlex will be shut down completely, and the website will be replaced with a static archive. Projects and sources will still be browsable online, but the source control system will no longer be operational.

GitHub is the preferred new home for CodePlex projects, and there's a straightforward import process that will copy CodePlex-hosted source and documentation to GitHub. Microsoft is also building a tool to migrate issues, though that's not ready yet. Projects can also be migrated to services such as Bitbucket. This will be appealing to those using Mercurial source control with CodePlex, as Bitbucket supports Mercurial in addition to the more common Git.