In this first iteration we wanted to keep it simple and lightweight. The original poster of the thread along with project owners, developers or editors can mark any post to the thread as an answer. You can have any number of answers marked in a thread and it’s very quick to mark or unmark a post as an answer.  We deliberately keep the answers in the originally posted order so that you can see them in context with the discussion thread.

When viewing discussions the default view is still to see everything, but you can easily filter by “Unanswered”.  You can even save that as a bookmark so as someone interested in the project can quickly jump to the unanswered discussion threads to go help out on.

As I mention, we kept this first pass of the answering feature as simple and as lightweight as possible so that we can get some feedback on it. Head on over to the issue tracking this feature if you have any thoughts once you have used it for a bit or feel free to respond in the comments. I already have a couple of things I think we want to do such as a refresh of the look and feel of discussions in general along, make it easier to navigate to posts that are marked an answered and surface posts that you do that were marked as answered in your profile page - but if you have ideas then please let us know.

Basically, if you insert a ‘#’ symbol followed by an integer in your commit statement, changeset comment or pull request comments then this will render as a link to the work item when displayed in the browser. We’ll be expanding on the work item grammar so I’m interested in what you think – I notice that the NuGet team quite often mention “Work Item: 1234” or “Issue 1234” when talking to work items so looks like we should probably expand the detection to use that pattern. If there are other ways that you find yourselves working already then let me know in the comments.

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!?! )

I normally work remote from a field in rural Northern Ireland but have been in the US visiting the office this week as you can see in the picture (yes despite the site rebrand I was glad to see we still have that flag). I’ve been getting up to speed with the CodePlex codebase and the architecture of the servers behind the site and I was just part of my first CodePlex deployment that included some of my own minor changes. I’m looking forward to doing some more substantial changes in the future. More importantly I get to do my own little bit to work with others who are supporting the open source community to be awesome. Exciting times ahead, but in the meantime if you have feedback then please do not hesitate to create an issue on the CodePlex site or ping me direct @martinwoodward.

To get started with this feature, navigate to the commit you are interested in from the source tab. As you hover over the line you would like to comment on, an icon to add a comment will appear to the left. Click on the icon, and comment away!

Once you comment on a line, the person who committed the change and anyone involved in the conversation will be notified of the comment by email.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Please visit our suggestions page! Vote for existing ideas or submit a new one.

As always you can reach out to the CodePlex team on Twitter @codeplex or reach me directly @Rick_Marron.

In addition to the Zapier integration, the CodePlex team also added Twitter cards. Now, if you tweet a link to CodePlex or use the new CodePlex Twitter integration, the tweet will have a summary of the CodePlex page that it links to. For example, if the link is to the TypeScript project, it will look like:

Finally, in this release, we also added an enhancement to our existing Trello integration. Now, you are able to archive Trello cards directly from commit messages. If your commit message contains “Trello Archive #31”, Trello card #31 will have a summary of the commit added to it, and it will be archived as well.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Please visit our suggestions page! Vote for existing ideas or submit a new one.

As always you can reach out to the CodePlex team on Twitter @codeplex or reach me directly @Rick_Marron.

To start off, we are going to be adding support for the following services:

• Campfire – Notify a Campfire chat room when commits occur
• HipChat – Notify a HipChat chat room when commits occur
• Trello – Add commit summaries to Trello cards by referencing those cards in commit messages
• Twitter – Notify your Twitter followers when updates are pushed to your project

In addition, we will continue to support our existing integrations with

• Windows Azure – Continuously deploy to Windows Azure on pushes (For Git and Hg projects)
• AppHarbor – Continuously deploy to AppHarbor on pushes

To set up these integrations for your project, navigate to the project settings page as a project coordinator, and click on the services section as seen below:

While we are starting with these six services, the infrastructure is now in place to allow us to quickly roll out new integrations. We would love to hear which services and integrations you would like to see most on our suggestions page.

We realize that there are some services and URLs that only make sense for your project to send notifications to. To support this scenario, we plan to add generic web hooks in the near future.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Please visit our suggestions page! Vote for existing ideas or submit a new one.

As always you can reach out to the CodePlex team on Twitter @codeplex or reach me directly @Rick_Marron.

In the source browser, relative links are also supported. To reference another file in your repository, you are able to use the following syntax:

• To link to a file in the current folder: [link title](another_file.md)
• To link to a file in a sub-folder: [link title](sub_folder/another_file.md)
• To link to a file in a parent folder: [link title](../another_file.md)
• To link to a file in the root folder: [link title](/file_in_root.md)

The relative links allow your documentation to make sense outside of the context of CodePlex.

In addition, we now support both Koka and Haskell syntax highlighting. Huge thanks to Daan for these contributions.

Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Please visit our suggestions page! Vote for existing ideas or submit a new one.

As always you can reach out to the CodePlex team on Twitter @codeplex or reach me directly @Rick_Marron

If you would like a URL to a specific version of a file, you can still get this by navigating to the specific commit through the history section of the source browser, or you can replace "/latest" in the new URLs with "/changeset/{commit SHA or changeset ID}".

We also added a new “settings” tab to CodePlex. This tab replaces the old “edit project summary and details” page that previously contained all project’s settings. The settings tab is only visible to project coordinators.

In addition to the above changes, the CodePlex team made the following notable improvements:

• Fixed a bug that was stopping users from uploading ClickOnce releases.
• Users will automatically become followers for projects they have created.
• When clicking a user’s name from the people tab, it will no longer open in a new tab.
• It is now possible to edit a closed issue.

• The column widths on the advanced issue tracker page has been improved.
• The word wrapping for commit messages was improved. Kudos to Taoyue
• A bug related to search results being incomplete has been fixed.