Promote a free library on the web

Question

I have nearly finished a free spellchecker library for Windows Mobile, and there are a few great forums around (both for developers and end-users), such as XDA, where you can promote your creations for Windows Mobile.

However, I have been thinking that I'd like to make a version of my library available for Windows desktop developers as well. Once I have finished the same, I'd like to distribute and promote it to get feedback, bug reports, and suggestions.

Are there good developer forums for promoting and distributing applications or libraries in this way?

Answer 1

You might want to consider writing an introductory review of your own library, and publish it on sites such as codeguru.com or codeproject.com. You could also use blogs of popular sites such as ddj.com to promote your library.

On the other hand, one very simple thing to do would be to set up a sourceforge project for your library (if it's open source) and then use their facilities for all these purposes. Specifically, you can easily use freshmeat.net to make your library more widely known.

You will need a certain minimum infrastructure (forum/mailing list, issue tracker and possibly source code management) in order to provide a place for your users to easily monitor or possibly even participate actively in your project.

A simple homepage and yahoo list might very well suffice, though.

Also, looking into available spell checking libraries in general, you will probably want to highlight the major differences between your implementation/project and more established ones such as for example GNU aspell or hunspell.

So, do make sure to do some research in order to get to know related projects.