Tuesday, September 03, 2013

CodePlex has a new face (well actually, he's kind of old, but you get the idea) - Martin Woodward joins the CodePlex team...

CodePlex Weblog - Hello

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You’ll be seeing some more posts from me here soon so wanted to quickly say hi. My name is Martin Woodward and I’ve just moved over to work on CodePlex team here in Microsoft as the PM. I’ve been part of the CodePlex community since May 2006 (3 years before I started here at Microsoft) so it’s very bizarre to be come work behind the curtain. Previous to coming to the CodePlex team I worked on the Git support in TFS and Visual Studio as well as working on Team Explorer Everywhere – the Eclipse and Cross-platform client to TFS. I’ve been and continue to be a contributor or maintainer on various open source projects around the internets, doing some fun things in various different languages. In fact the commit that I’m most proud of in an open source project  isn’t actually one that is hosted on CodePlex at all - it was just a small bit of code I knocked up as a weekend project and then contributed to the PDE project in Eclipse. Basically it enabled some Java code to rewrite the eclipse.exe launcher on 64-bit versions of Windows at a binary level, injecting a custom icon as part of a Java based build process. It was just a small fix to an arcane bit of code that manipulated the Portable Executable file format at a binary level in Windows. This was just a raindrop in an ocean of code written that day. Yet because I took 5 minutes to attach the patch to a bug report the code has lived on for years and is still being used by organizations all over the planet, and beyond (NASA use PDE based tooling when dealing with nuclear powered, laser toting robots in outer space – how cool is that!?! )

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My RadioTFS co-host has a new gig at one of my favorite Microsoft services, CodePlex! While the CodePlex team has been chugging along, quietly and constantly improving CodePlex, it's good to see Martin take on this role. He's kind of an outsider (kind-of) so it will be great to see his influence in the product.

I had to laugh. He and I had a "Man Moment" the other day. I proudly said I'd been a CodePlex member since early beta (May 19th, 2006). Martin? May 16th, 2006. He wins. grrr.... LOL

Anyway, I expect in the coming months and years we're going to see a resurgence of, and renewed interest in, CodePlex. (Well, a boy can dream, right?  ;)

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