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I have been thoroughly confused by CodePlex and the TFS services it offers or doesn't offer. I am going to soon begin working on on open source project with a few friends using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. Because VS is so nicely tied in with TFS, we would prefer to use TFS.

However, we do not have the money to purchase TFS ourselves, so we were looking at CodePlex as an alternative. Does CodePlex offer free TFS hosting? I believed it did, until I came across this which led me to believe it only offers part of the TFS feature set.

(This is my first experience with version/source control, so please be light on the terminology.)

Shivam Sarodia
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CodePlex offers free TFS hosting with a feature set aimed at hosting open-source projects. Its version control offerings are complete, but Team Foundation Server is a platform with many feature areas, so let's look at those:

Version Control: CodePlex supports the entire feature set of TFS Version Control. In fact, CodePlex pioneered some version control tools for TFS like their SVNBridge.

Work Item Tracking: Team Foundation Server allows for a customizable work item tracking template and ships several out-of-the box to suit development processes ranging from CMMI to Agile. CodePlex, however, provides a single work item tracking template that is suitable for open source projects and does not allow customization.

Continuous Integration: CodePlex does not support automated builds at this time. You can set up your own continuous integration builds against a CodePlex endpoint for source code, though.

Document Repository: There is no SharePoint document repository available in CodePlex.

Reports: SQL Reporting Services are not available in CodePlex.

I would argue that for a small open-source project, none of these are deal-breakers. For a very large project, however, some or all of these features may be desirable, though.

If you want to use TFS and you are looking for a cost-effective solution for a small project, you may also want to look into Team Foundation Service, which is currently free while it is in its preview state. (Future pricing has not yet been announced.)

Edward Thomson
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  • Thanks for your reply. I'll look into Team Foundation Service, I may be interested in it. – Shivam Sarodia Aug 01 '12 at 02:37
  • @edward: does the CodePlex supports continuous integration now, because we I tried to add a build definition I am getting an access denied exception!! Is it possible to enable CI for CodePlex TFS projects? – wizzardz Jul 22 '15 at 16:52