Today at the Open Source Business Conference in London, Microsoft has unveiled CodePlex, an online collaborative software development portal that is also a vehicle for sharing source code. Microsoft CodePlex is already home to more than 30 collaborative development efforts, including open source software projects that reflect the open community-building spirit of Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative.

“CodePlex provides a forum to bring together developers from around the world and gives them tools, source code and an advanced platform for designing and building software,” said Jon Rosenberg, director of Community Source Programs at Microsoft. “CodePlex is just one of the ways in which Microsoft is fostering collaborative community innovation. Through the Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft has engaged with over 2 million developers on 120 different programs.”

To date, CodePlex has received more than 100,000 visits worldwide since the beta testing stage began in May of this year. The community interest in the projects posted during the beta testing stage has led to the addition of a host of new projects to the portal, which has grown from a dozen initially to more than 30.

CodePlex functionality, built on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, provides source control, issue tracking, discussion forums and RSS feeds in and out of each project so that members can stay up to date on the development issues most important to them. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server enables developers to collaboratively develop, share, discuss and consume source code and build software.

The Shared Source Initiative and open source projects available on CodePlex today include projects such as the “Atlas” Control Toolkit, IronPython 1.01 Beta 1 and Power Toys for Visual Studio. More information about these and other projects is available at http://www.codeplex.com.