CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data

by Peter Galli on May 06, 2010 12:08pm

The latest update to CodePlex, Microsoft's Open Source software project hosting repository, brings integration with PreEmptive Solutions' Runtime Intelligence Service, which lets users instrument their applications to get analytics on their runtime usage.

While CodePlex has long offered reports on what user activity occurs on the project Web site, what happened after the user downloaded the software was unknown. Now, using the analytics capability of this application, CodePlex users can see information like how many people are using the application.

The Runtime Intelligence Service lets developers inject usage instrumentation directly into application binaries. When the application is run by an end-user, the instrumentation will collect analytics data from the application, but no personally identifiable information is ever collected, and applications can include opt-out dialogues.

You can read more about this news on the CodePlex blog.

It is also important to point out that while this application monitoring will be available to every CodePlex project (there are currently more than 14,000 of these), it is not required. Also, developers using Visual Studio 2010 do not need to license any additional software, while other development teams can use the commercial Dotfuscator edition to inject instrumentation.

Developers can find additional documentation and a tutorial here.

This update follows one earlier this year where CodePlex announced support for Mercurial, a distributed source control management system. New projects created on CodePlex.com can now be use either Team Foundation Server or Mercurial as the source control repository.