Black Duck, Microsoft Team for CodePlex Search

Black Duck and Microsoft have collaborated to automate the addition of open-source projects from Microsoft’s CodePlex repository into Black Duck’s KnowledgeBase and Koders.com.

Black Duck officials said the collaboration will provide additional resources for software developers to better find and manage the use of open-source code in development projects, whether pure open source or in mixed-source development environments.

Now with CodePlex projects added on an ongoing basis into Black Duck’s KnowledgeBase open-source project database, Black Duck customers will have access to the vast Black Duck repository of information about open-source projects-including code that is relevant to developers who work on Microsoft projects. Moreover, any developer using the Koders.com open-source search engine will be able to search for open-source projects previously available only through CodePlex, Black Duck officials said.

Microsoft’s CodePlex is an open-source project hosting site, which hosts 9,000 projects with 100 new projects added each week. The majority of projects hosted on CodePlex are for Windows and .NET development, but CodePlex accepts projects for any technology. Meanwhile, Black Duck’s KnowledgeBase is a searchable database containing information on more than 200,000 open-source projects collected from more than 4,100 Internet sites; more than 40,000 new projects have been added to the KnowledgeBase since January 2009, Black Duck officials said. The Black Duck KnowledgeBase enables customers to leverage, manage and detect the use of open-source components in software application development projects. And Black Duck’s Koders.com is a search engine for open-source projects that contains more than two billion lines of open-source code; Koders.com is growing at a rate of about 2,000 projects per month.

“CodePlex is one of the fastest-growing open-source hosting sites,” says Peter Vescuso, Black Duck executive vice president of marketing and business development. “This agreement will make it easier and faster for Black Duck to manage the steady stream of new projects hosted on the site. By teaming with Microsoft, we are assured of comprehensive, ongoing coverage of CodePlex projects in the KnowledgeBase.”

“We are teaming with Black Duck to ensure availability of CodePlex projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase,” said Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy. “Black Duck’s KnowledgeBase is a useful resource for development managers tasked with managing open-source code in mixed-source development environments. The addition of CodePlex projects makes this a more powerful development resource.”

Black Duck Software is a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner and a Windows Embedded Partner.