Update: I’ve created a new NuGet Package for Identicon Handler (Package Id is “IdenticonHandler”) which will make it much easier to include this in your own projects.

A while ago, Jeff Atwood blogged about Identicons for .NET. An Identicon is an anonymized visual glyph that can represent an IP address. I likened it to a Graphical Digital Fingerprint.

Identicon samples

The original concept and Java implementation was created by Don Park.

Afterwards, Jeff and Jon Galloway became excited by the idea and ported Don’s code to C# and .NET 2.0 and released it on his website.

This weekend, we’ve spent some time working out a few kinks and performance improvements and are proud to release version 1.1 on CodePlex.

Why CodePlex?

We chose CodePlex for this project because the codebase for this is extremely small, so the patch issue I mentioned in my critique, A Comparison of TFS vs Subversion for Open Source Projects, is not quite as large an issue.

We don’t expect this project to grow very large and have a huge number of releases. This code does one thing, and hopefully, does it well.

So in that respect, CodePlex seems like a great host for this type of small project. It is really easy to get other developers up and running if need be.

Having said that, I probably wouldn’t host a large project here yet based on the critique I mentioned.