Windows Live Writer

George Trifonov has written a nice tutorial on how to implement your own MetaWeblog based blog engine on his site and published the article on Codeprojectt. He also provides the full implementation in C# as a download. With the sample George enables you to use Windows Live Writer, for example, when writing blog posts.

The Windows Live Writer has once again been updated, it’s still a Technical Preview. The new and updated version contains numerous improvements to the interface and introduces a brand new plugin model. New and improved features The interface has received some updates such as a tabs for switching between views and a nice feature which allows you to edit your post using your blog theme (might have been in previous builds, but this was the first time I’ve seen it).

The great blogging application Windows Live Writer has left the beta phase and is now released, as a part of the Windows Live Wave 2, with version 12.0.1366.1026. Below is the previous About screen and as you can see there are no Beta remark anymore… I have not yet found any information on what’s new or what’s updated, but I guess we will soon here about it!

 A new developers community for Windows Live developers - Via Windows Live - has just been launched. The community site contains sections about Silverlight, Live ID, Live Writer, Messenger, Alerts and all the other Live products. As of now the content is quite thin, but it’s up to you/us to fill it with useful information. Just register and then start using it. The site has a Wiki, a Gallery, Articles and more. And you can subscribe to the “aggregated blog of everything Windows Live”.

You probably already have read all about the new beta of Windows Live Writer. I thought I should write some lines about some of the new really nice features. Linking WLW contains an improved linking interface. You can easily link to your previous posts or to a link in the Link Glossary, using the Link to button_,_ which allows you to write down (remember) a number of links that you often use in your blog posts. When you create a new link you can check the Add to link glossary checkbox and the link will be added to your glossary. The glossary is also accessible from the Tools->Options dialog.

When writing blog posts I once in a while link to classes and methods in the MSDN Library. So why not simplify this job a bit by writing yet another Windows Live Writer plugin - MSDN Locator plugin for Windows Live Writer. The plugin allows you to search for a class, namespace, method or property using the full name and then inserts a link tag with a description (title attribute).

Yesterday I sat at home using my XP Media Center and decided to check out the Windows Live Gallery if ther were any new interesting Writer Plugins. I fired up Internet Explorer and browsed to the gallery via the link from one of my earlier posts to my Acronyms Plugin. I ended up in an error page that said that the request could not be handled, pleas try again in five minutes. The page was in swedish and provided a link to the Gallery start page, which also was in swedish and there were no links to the Writer Plugins. To bad for people in sweden! But, it all worked fine on my laptop a few hours ago and my first guess, which was right, was that Internet Explorer was defaulting to the Swedish language (found under Internet Options - Languages), and my laptop used English (United States).

Windows Live Writer has been upgraded and I wrote a post on the Metaweblog standard conformance of WLW in a previously. The metaWeblog.getCategories I suggested to use to get it to work with Windows Live Writer will now fail since Writer expects that a description is passed in the response. That is your response has to look like this, watch the lines 18-21 and 32-35. 1 <?xml version="1.0"?> 2 <methodResponse> 3 <params> 4 <param> 5 <value> 6 <array> 7 <data> 8 <value> 9 <struct>10 <member>11 <name>categoryid<name>12 <value>1</value>13 <member>14 <member>15 <name>title< span="">name>16 <value>Category 1< span="">value>17 <member>18 <member>19 <name>description< span="">name>20 <value>Description 1< span="">value>21 <member>22 </struct>23 <struct>24 <member>25 <name>categoryid< span="">name>26 <value>2</value>27 <member>28 <member>29 <name>title< span="">name>30 <value>Category 2< span="">value>31 <member>32 <member>33 <name>description< span="">name>34 <value>Description 2</value>35 </member>36 </struct>37 </value>38 </data>39 </array>40 </value>41 </param>42 </params>43 </methodResponse>

I’ve released a small update, version 1.2, to the Acronyms Plugin for the Windows Live Writer in which some minor bugs have been smashed and the possibility to enter your own acronyms has been fixed. Download it form the Windows Live Gallery or directly from this site.

Today the Windows Live Gallery was updated with a plugin gallery for Windows Live Writer and my plugin for Windows Live Writer is updated with a new and improved interface and functionality. The Windows Live Writer team has gone through the plugin and given me good feedback, which now are implemented. Implementation as a simple content source Possible to write your own custom description of an acronym Improved user interface If you want to download it do it here or from the Windows Live Gallery.

There seems to be some kind of software release frenzy at Redmond right now. Microsoft are spitting out application after application and I don’t mean the two huge ones; MIcrosoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office (Server) System. Applications, small and big, like Internet Explorer 7, Windows Live Writer, XNA Game Studios, different Microsoft Live applications, Windows Desktop Search and now XML Notepad 2006 are dropping out from the software factory. It’s fun, but it takes me so much time reading and catching up on the releases.

The Acronyms plugin for Windows Live Writer has been updated. The plugin now contains more customization on how to generate the markup when publishing the post. You now have the option to use either the span, acronym or abbr tags. Download it here.

To kill some spare time I decided to create a plugin for Windows Live Writer that is named Acronyms Plugin for Windows Live Writer. It’s a small and simple plugin that let you search for the meaning of an acronym and insert into you post. You have to option to insert the acronym with the description inline or as a tooltip. When using the tooltip option the acronym will be inserted with a

Tim Heuer has written a really nice Flickr plugin for Windows Live Writer, flickr4writer. Go check it out and/or contribute with expertise or ideas. I’d like to see an Upload to Flickr feature of flickr4writer in the next release.

This is just me testing my own implementation of MetaWeblog API made in C# and ASP.NET 2.0. This post is created using the Windows Live Writer (beta) which of course did not work directly. I had to do some special fixes to get the MetaWeblog API to work according to the specifications I read through. I’ll get back about that another day. Now I got to go home to put my daughter to bed.

I found this post about Windows Live Writer at MSTechToday. Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Read more about it and download it at the Writer Zone. The installation program also installs Windows Live Toolbar. It’s worth checking out…