Migrating projects from CodePlex to GitHub due to CodePlex shutting down at the end of year

calendarApr 2, 2017 · 2 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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It has just been announced by Microsoft that it’s Open Source service CodePlex is shutting down before the end of the year. The reality is that the Microsoft focused Open Source community, and Microsoft itself, have moved to GitHub a good while ago.

I think I, like most developers, have moved any active Open Source projects to GitHub a good while ago,  but I still had legacy ones on CodePlex.

Microsoft have provided a nicely documented process to move the key assets of projects, whether TFVC or Git based, to GitHub. This process worked for me. However, I will suggest a could of changes/additions

  1. I would not export the WIKI docs as detailed in the process. I don’t want my old CodePlex Wiki pages in the new GitHub code repository as a folder. I think it is better to move each page over to a GitHub WIki. I only had few pages, so I did this by hand. I used this nice little tools  from Dom Christie to convert the CodePlex HTML based pages to Markdown which I cut and pasted into the new repo’s Wiki, fixing URLs as I went.
  2. I decided I needed to consider release downloads. The process does not do address this area. I thought I should bring over at least the last set of release binaries for my projects as a Github Releases. The reason was that the chances are for any old inactive project on CodePlex you won’t have the tools to hand to re-build the code easily, so just in case it is best to keep the last built version to hand as a release
  3. The process does not bring over Issues, but this was not a problem for me, the projects I have been superseded by active ones already on Github, so the issues are irrelevant

So if you have old CodePlex projects and you don’t want them to disappear think about moving them before the service is shutdown, you have until December 2017.