Articles and Tutorials

Submit an Article

Sharing your knowledge and experience with others is a great way to help the Codejock development community. By doing so you will also receive allot of positive feedback such as bug reports, testing, and suggestions on how to make your code even better.

Overview

Submitting your article encourages others to share their experience as well, providing a wealth of knowledge and information for the entire community.

You Retain Ownership

When you post an article or tutorial on our site you will always retain full ownership of your article including all source code. You are only granting Codejock Software permission to publish your article on our site, and to allow other developers to use your source code and any information contained in your article in their own applications. This is usually done with a provision that they do not remove your copyright notices or try and take credit for your work.

Preparing Your Article

You should try to make your code and article as easy to read and understand as possible. This will help ensure that your article is well read and understood, we suggest the following:

  • Create a brief description of your code including what it does, and how to use it in a project. You can download a template article to help get you started [ click here ]. Also make sure you have read the instructions for using the template article [ click here ].
  • It is helpful to describe any problems that you ran across while developing the code, this makes for good reading and helps others learn from your experience.
  • Prepare an application that fully demonstrates your code, including a small screen shot for the article.
  • Fully comment your source code.

Article Check List

Before you submit your article and source code please make sure that your submission has the following components:

  • An article that explains your code.
  • A small screen shot in either GIF, JPEG or PNG file formats. The width should not exceed 575 pixels.
  • A Zip file that contains your source files (if applicable)
  • A Zip file containing your sample project (if applicable)
  • Your name and contact information.

Package all of the material in your article into a single Zip File and email it to submit@codejock.com. When submitting your article please provide a title for your article in the subject line and also which category you believe the article should be posted to.

Updating Your Article

Updating Article Download and Image Files

If you need to update your download or image files you can do so by sending an email to submit@codejock.com along with the article name and page url. Make sure you have attached a zip file to your message for the download(s) and/or GIF, JPEG or PNG for image files that need to be updated.

Updating Article Text

When you post your article we will check the article for grammar and spelling mistakes, and also format it so the page fits the look and feel of our site. When editing your article, it is easier for us if you edit the page HTML rather than submitting a new file. To do this simply right click on the page and view its source. Save the file locally with an html extension and only edit the areas between <!-- Article Starts --> and <!-- Article Ends -->.

When you are finished, send an email to submit@codejock.com along with your *.html file attached. If you only have a small change to make such as spelling or grammar, you can describe the changes in the body of your email instead of attaching a separate HTML file.

Source code Syntax Colorization

It is not necessary to add HTML tags to colorize your article's source code, we will do this for you once you submit your article.

The Article

Make sure that you include some form of documentation in your article, this will help the reader get a better understanding of your source code and the purpose of your article. The following check list should help with ideas on what areas to provide documentation for.

  • Describe the purpose the code is to be used for.
  • Describe how you would integrate the code with an existing application or source code.
  • If there is a similar article already posted, describe how your article differs, and what advantages there are for using your version.
  • Is there a particular portion of the source code that requires detailed explanation or description? If so document it in your article.
  • Are there any particular environments the code is restricted to? (i.e.: Windows NT or above, Visual Basic 6.0, Etc.)

The Zip file

Please make sure that you zip all files up using the best compression available, .zip or .rar format is acceptable. Also remove all object code that is not necessary from your project. An example of this would be files with a *.opt, *.ncb, *.obj, *.aps, *.plg or *.suo file extension. If possible, please keep the zip file below 300 Kb.

File Naming Convention

Please use the same naming convention for all of the files you are submitting. This will help organize your article better. An example of this would be an article that includes one HTML file, one source code file and one image file might looks something similar to this:

  • myarticle.html  -  Your article in HTML format.
  • myarticle.zip  -  The zipped source code for your article.
  • myarticle.gif  - An image to accompany your article.

If your article is slightly larger and has multiple images and download files, then your filenames would be similar to this:

  • myarticle.html  -  Your article in HTML format.
  • myarticle_src.zip  -  The zipped source code for your article.
  • myarticle_demo.zip  -  The zipped demo project for your article.
  • myarticle1.gif  -  An image to accompany your article.
  • myarticle2.gif  -  A second image to accompany your article.

Source code Guidelines

Make sure that you have double checked your code and that it actually works. Also, make sure that your code compiles cleanly without any warnings or errors and any demo applications will run without any problems. It is good practice that you adhere to any conventions that are used for your language. This helps other programmers understand your code more easily. Some conventions that are widely accepted by programmers when writing code are:

  • The use of Hungarian notation in MFC (e.g. Variable prefixes such as "n" for int, "d" for double etc.)
  • The use of Win32/Visual C++ types such as UINT, LPCTSTR etc.
  • Camel case in .NET code

Sample Project

Sample Executable

When providing a sample executable, please make sure that it is a release build and not linked against any Unicode or Debug libraries. This will help ensure that your executable will run correctly in different environments.

Sample Project

We recommend that you include a sample project with your article. When creating a zip file for the sample project, please do not include any Debug or Release directories. This will help keep the download Zip file size to a minimum.

Submitting an article based on another person's work

When basing your code on another author's work you should make it very clear that some or most of the code isn't yours. This of course will depend on the situation and how much of the author's work you are using. You should NOT remove any copyright notices. You should always give credit where credit's due, in the code and the HTML as appropriate.

Submitting code already posted at another site

You are more than welcome to submit code that is already published at another site, provided you own the copyright on that article, and provided you have not given the other site exclusive rights to your article.

The Article Submission Template

The template file contains a HTML template for use when submitting articles to Codejock Software. We strongly recommend that you use this file when creating your article, all unnecessary HTML formatting will be removed. Following these guidelines will help us get your article posted sooner.