Starting a new Open Source project shouldn’t be this hard

Creating an open source project should be easy. This describes my experience with SourceForge and CodePlex when I tried to create my first project.

Wow!  I thought it would be easier than that.  I have this application I started writing that I feel would be useful to lots of people out there and decided to share.  I wrote an application that takes the output of a Nessus scan and loads it into an SQL Server database.  I intend on working on this over time and add features like reporting.  Ultimately, what I am after is better reporting as the Nessus application only provides ONE report.

Since I wrote the code in C Sharp, I decided to go the one of the best known repository for Microsoft technology open source projects, CodePlex.  Creating the project was quick enough, but I can’t seem to be able to access the source code tab.  I always get the message that The source control server is currently unavailable. Fine, I’m moving on.

So I went to the best known open source repository, SourceForge.net, and created my project.  It looks like it needs to be reviewed by humans before I can even start uploading code.  Great!  It was bed time anyway.

Today, I decided to see if by chance my project in SourceForge would allow to upload code, and it does.  Awesome.  CodePlex is still displaying the same error message.  I don’t know if it is me who is doing something wrong or what.  I cannot find anywhere to go if I have problems.  What looks like their support board actually contains more suggestions for enhancements than support requests.