CodeProject

» see codeproject.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed codeproject. by the time i was writing real code in the late 2000s i was on linux and python, then later on embedded c for vision pipelines. codeproject was a windows-desktop community. visual c++, mfc, winforms,.net framework, the whole microsoft stack that i never properly learned because the work i was being assigned in those years did not need it. when codeproject articles surfaced in my search results they were usually older than the version of windows i was supposed to support, so i would skim them and move on.

the site launched in november '99 out of toronto. chris maunder and david cunningham started it as an archive of articles about microsoft foundation classes, which was the c++ ui framework everyone writing desktop windows software was forced to use at the time. the article model was simple. you wrote a tutorial or a code sample, posted it with a license, other members rated it from one to five stars, the highest-rated contributors got reputation points and eventually an mvp badge that you could put in your email signature.

through the 2000s and into the 2010s codeproject grew into the default community for everyone outside the unix and web worlds. fifteen and a half million registered members by january '23, the ten-million-member mark hit back in august '13. articles spanned c++, c#, vb.net, sql server, sharepoint, biztalk, eventually wpf and xamarin. for a generation of developers in india and eastern europe the site was the place to find a working code sample for a problem the official microsoft documentation only half-answered. stackoverflow eventually absorbed most of the question-and-answer traffic, but codeproject articles were longer-form than a stack accepted-answer and stayed useful as tutorials.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually ended ~

codeproject solutions inc had been losing money for nearly two years by the time the read-only announcement went out on october 22, '24. the explanation was the tech recession. ad revenue collapsed in '23 across the developer-content vertical, the recruiting market that paid for sponsored posts dried up. the company could not justify keeping the writing-and-commenting infrastructure live without paid staff to moderate it.

d2 emerge llc, the company that already published sd times, acquired codeproject in november '24. the new owner talked about reviving the article publishing side, but the years between october '24 and march '26 were mostly a read-only archive that occasionally hosted a community discord post. the public site went fully offline in march '26. the wayback machine has crawls of most of the high-traffic articles. the discord moved on to its own life.

~ what got buried with it ~

codeproject was one of the last surviving examples of the long-tutorial format the web grew up on. an article with a working visual studio solution attached, screenshots, a license, twenty comments below from people who tried the code and had questions. that format mostly died in the 2010s when stackoverflow's short-answer model became the default, then again in the early 2020s when ai coding assistants pulled the same role into a chat window.

the people who wrote codeproject articles for fifteen years got nothing for it in the end except the reputation points on a profile page that was about to go offline. some of those authors went on to write books or run their own blogs. most of them just stopped writing tutorials.

credit to a reader who described the morning newsletter ritual.

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