The Microsoft community development site, CodePlex, celebrated its second anniversary in early August.

On Aug. 6, S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, blogged that CodePlex had reached its second year of operation as a Microsoft-run hosting site. The community site houses open-source software that can be used by developers to build applications that run on Microsoft technology and other systems. Developers can go to CodePlex for software for building things from Web applications to presentation layer components to enterprise applications.

For instance, the IronPython project, which is hosted on CodePlex, helps developers build Python applications that run on the .Net platform.

"It seems like only recently, but it has been two years since we launched CodePlex," Somasegar said in his blog. "We launched this in summer 2006 as Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Our goal was, and continues to be, to provide developers with the ability to collaborate on open source projects using the tools they are most familiar with."

He said CodePlex has grown steadily over the two years, "recently achieving two major milestones: 1,000,000 unique visitors/month and 5,000 total projects. CodePlex projects appeal to many audiences and include the AJAX Control Toolkit, Rawr (a .Net tool for World of Warcraft), and IronPython."

In addition, Somasegar said:

"To give you a glimpse into some of the technology behind the site, CodePlex is built on Team Foundation Server (TFS). Specifically, seven TFS servers run more than 5,600 projects and cater to 12,000 project developers and 120,000 code check-ins."

Open-source developers can use the Visual Studio Team Explorer client for free with CodePlex to get the full integrated development experience, Somasegar said. CodePlex also supports a wide range of other source control clients, such as TortoiseSVN and TeamPrise, to give users more flexibility and cross-platform access, he said.

In response to Somasegar's blog, one commenter, identified as Mark Gordon, said, "Why not publish the full open source of Visual FoxPro instead of the smoke and mirrors nonsense of Sedna or the source for Visual Basic. ...  Microsoft and Open Source is like using Rapid Application Development and Visual Studio in the same sentence."

Meanwhile, also in a blog post, Sara Ford, a Microsoft engineer and CodePlex supporter, listed the "Top Five Myths and Facts about CodePlex."