Roy Osherove

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Commandments for a publishable article

I was having a chat with Lauri Travis, one of the editors of MSDNAA. Lauri has been reading some of the blogs here, and was glad to find lots of great .Net content in this little community. In our chat, I suggested Lauri created her own .Net weblog, since she helps run a .Net user group, and an editor on one of the biggest tech related sites on the net.

We talked about what one would write about in such a blog, and I immediatly thought that, given her current role, she could contribute as to the process in which she makes the selection between publishable material and stuff that erm.. is not publishable.  She said she has no real time to start her own blog, but she could provide me with her “commandments” to a publishable article:

  1. Technically relevant subject matter.
  2. Up to date with latest version.
  3. Plenty of code that will build with no errors in VS .NET.
  4. A good explanation of the code in the article.
  5. Code that is well formatted in the article and downloadable source code with the complete project files.
  6. Articles that are chosen for the Contributor Spotlight Section typically have about half source code and about half text.
  7. Articles that discuss things that are not common – embedded technologies, mobile etc.
  8. Last but not least – my favorite articles are the ones that make you go “Wow!  That was neat! I want to try it!” 

Update:

Lauri says: “Everyone who reads this should send me an article for MSDNAA!”