Windows Live Writer Plugin for MSDN URLs

Heath Stewart

June 16th, 20070 0

I have posted a Windows Live Writer plugin I wrote to aide posting URLs to MSDN, simply named Paste MSDN URL. It removes, if present, the culture in the URL so that when a reader clicks the link he or she sees the content on MSDN in their preferred language if a translation is available.

So, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372866.aspx translates to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/aa372866.aspx. Additionally, the plugin by default fetches the title of the page, so pasting the above URL fetches Windows Installer (Windows). You can turn this off in the options for the plugin through the Options dialog in Writer.

I generally try to remove the culture myself when writing posts, but it is tedious and I’m sure there are quite a few I have missed. This plugin will help avoid that situation and I thought other bloggers using Writer might find it handy as well.

There are a few caveats because of the current design of UrlContentSource plugins:

Writer doesn’t provide data from the “Hyperlink” clipboard format Office registers and uses for hyperlinks.
Writer doesn’t provide URLs posts from the built-in hyperlink tool (Ctrl+K), which I actually find desirable.

Updated: Please note there is no authored UI in order to provide a quick install of this small plugin. Windows Installer were basically only show progress but on Vista and newer a prompt for elevation will be displayed if UAC is enabled. Once installed, the plugin handled only Paste operations. There is nothing for it in the Insert menu. You can confirm it is installed by looking in the Plugins panel in the Options dialog in Writer.