What should I do to keep a tiny Open Source project active and sustainable?

Question

A couple of months ago I've coded a tiny tool that we needed at work for a specific task, and I've decided to share it on CodePlex. It's written in C# and honestly it's not big deal but since it's the first project I've ever built from scratch in that language and with the goal of opening it from the very beginning, one ends getting sort of emotionally attached to it, I mean you'd wish that the people will actually participate, be it criticism, bug reporting, or what have you.

So my question is, what can I do to actually encourage participation, stimulate curiosity or just recieve more feedback about it?

By the way this is the project I'm talking about: http://www.codeplex.com/winxmlcook/

Answer 1

Post it on stackoverflow ;)

Answer 2

You should:

• Promote it where you think it would be relevant (forums,mailing lists etc.). Try not to spam though - it will create a backlash.
• continue to provide updates as to create the appearance of an active project until more people pick it up.
• Find project leaders, they are the sort of contributors that encourage others to contribute as well.
• Blog about it and link to relevant blogs (creating ping-backs). Also leave comments at relevant blog posts.

Basically, your generic Internet marketing tactics ;)

Answer 3

I know I sound like a broken record constantly posting this book, but just about everything you could ever need to know about running an open source project is here. In particular, pay attention to these two chapters:

• Getting Started
• Managing Volunteers

Answer 4

You first have to acquire users by marketing the tool. Once you have users, that naturally means you'll start getting feedback.

One thing I noticed is your project description doesn't sell the project well. For example, type "winxmlcook" into Google, what gets shown is your project description but it's not likely to get someone to click on it.