CodePlex

CodePlex  was an open-source forge website owned by Microsoft that enabled users to upload and share their own software. The website launched in May 2006, and there were several features including the ability to add documentation. In December 2017, Microsoft announced they would be shutting down the website and creating a full archive of the projects on the website after the shutdown, called the CodePlex Archive.

The website finally went offline on January 29, 2018 and redirected users to archive.codeplex.com. The original site lived for approximately 11 years.

History
In early 2004, an early version of CodePlex went online for only a few hours to users following a website development issue.

Official launch
On May 25, 2006, Microsoft released a public beta version of CodePlex as CodePlex Beta on the domain codeplex.com. One of the first projects was named DBMetadataGenerator.

Possibly around August 2006, the website exited beta and became available worldwide. The site used a 'greeny' look for a few years before changing the theme to plain white.

Shutdown
In late 2017, Microsoft executive blogger Brian Harry posted Shutting down CodePlex on his blog, a post explaining the website's future shutdown planned for December 15th. When the post was published CodePlex was already set to read-only. A few days after CodePlex's planned shutdown date of December 15th users going to the site domain would not see the page.

In January 2018, the website redirected users to the CodePlex archive.