Windows Live Writer: Known Issue

Let me save you some time if I can with a known issue in the Writer beta.  Doh!  My previous post, which just got posted moments before this one, was actually finished earlier this morning.  When I hit the Publish button, I received the following error:

"Blog Server Error: Server Error 0 Occurred - Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

I tried opening/closing Writer, but kept getting the same error.  I thought, "Uh oh, this can't be good!" 

Well, after posting the error on one of our internal mailing lists, I got a quick response.  It turns out that this was caused by a known issue in the current beta build 1.0 (109).  In my previous post, I mentioned how I accidentally hit the Publish button half way through and it ended up going live on my blog for a short time.  Since Writer doesn't have a "Delete Post" button (at least none that I saw at the time), I manually deleted the post using the manage settings UI in Community Server.  That's where I ran into my problem...

From Spike on the WL Writer team:

There is a known bug with deleting a posted entry that is currently open in Writer. The problem is that we have an ID associated with that post, and so we try to send an update command to the blog service, but since that ID no longer exists, you get an error.

If you have multiple blogs configured, in the post window, you can switch to another blog, and then back to the blog you want and that will cause the Writer to drop the post ID information so you can re-publish as a new post.

-Spike

I went back into Writer and attempted the workaround by connecting Writer to my personal blog on Windows Live Spaces.  I toggled between my personal & work blogs, then attempted to re-post.  This time, when I hit the publish button, everything worked, and you see the previous post perfectly!