Short Bytes: Microsoft has announced that it’s shutting down its open source code hosting service CodePlex. The website will be completely shut down in December, 2017. The backups will be made available to the users in common, transferable formats. Microsoft has also published a guide to help the devs shift their code to Github.

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n 2006, Microsoft launched CodePlex as an alternative to SourceForge. Back then, it was being seen as Redmond’s one of the biggest steps into the world of open source. But, on Friday, Microsoft announced that CodePlex will be closed down.

Without a doubt, today, GitHub is the de facto standard for hosting the open source projects. Even Microsoft is using this open source code hosting platform for its own projects like Visual Studio Code, .NET, TypeScript, Cognitive Toolkit, etc. Probably, this popularity of GitHub has inspired Microsoft to say goodbye to CodePlex.

In its announcement post, Microsoft told the world that they’ve disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects. The website will be completely shut down on December 15th, 2017. Before that, in October, the website will be set to read-only.

By December, Microsoft will back up everything and turn off the servers. The archives will become downloadable in different formats like JSON and Markdown.

Microsoft has also published a guide to help the developers move their projects to GitHub. You can find the guide here.

What do you think about this development? Do you use GitHub for hosting your open source code?