Windows Live Writer

I need to take a step back and take notice of all of the great applications that our team enables more often.  We enable some great integrations between the web and the desktop by having all HTTP protocol stacks live in one Microsoft team.  Whether it is WinHttp, System.Net, WinINet, or the HTTP Server APIs, our HTTP protocol stacks are in heavy use by some of the applications that many have come to rely on and love.  This fact has once again been hammered home with the recent release of Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer is a FREE blog authoring, publishing and managment application written in .Net managed code.  The application is a full-featured, responsive and rich-editing environment that, honestly, makes me want to blog more!  It includes a number of features that you would expect in a for-fee application such as spell checking, a layout manager, picture & offline support, extensibility and flexible blog server support. 

I have personally only used Windows Live Writer with Community Server and Windows Live Spaces, but it supports other, popular, services/APIs such as Wordpress.com; TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress, Radio Userland, dasBlog, and the Metaweblog and Movable Type APIs.  That's awesome!

Outside of the cool user features it's also great to note that the tool is writing using both both System.NET and the Web Browser control which uses WinINet for its web service calls and displaying web content, respectively.  I love seeing the Windows Live Division leverage the power of the desktop and the broad reach of the Web.

Thanks to J.J. Allaire and the rest of the Windows Live Writer team for a great beta.  I look forward to the final product and more feature-rich Web-enabled applications from other Windows Live teams.

- Billy Anders