When I started blogging, I looked at a number of tools to help me write and publish my posts and have to say that I became really addicted to Windows Live Writer.
The thing I love about it is that it is simple, focused and straight to the point. Very easy to use and configure, provides all the features I need, good customisation options and a SDK to create plug-ins.
The latest Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer has just been released and it adds a few interesting features:
Quoting from the WLW Dev Team blog… “This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events.” “The biggest changes are the additions of two new plugin types: publish notification hooks and header/footer content sources. Publish notification hook plugins allow you to execute code before and after Writer posts content to a weblog. They can examine the contents of the post and have the option to cancel the publish operation. Header/footer source plugins insert headers or footers during publishing. Headers and footers are not directly editable by Writer users and do not appear in Writer’s editing views, but are visible in the Preview view (and of course, on the published blog post).”
Quoting from the WLW Dev Team blog… “This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events.”
“The biggest changes are the additions of two new plugin types: publish notification hooks and header/footer content sources. Publish notification hook plugins allow you to execute code before and after Writer posts content to a weblog. They can examine the contents of the post and have the option to cancel the publish operation. Header/footer source plugins insert headers or footers during publishing. Headers and footers are not directly editable by Writer users and do not appear in Writer’s editing views, but are visible in the Preview view (and of course, on the published blog post).”
I am writing this using the new version of Windows Live Writer and testing the two new plugins that come with the SDK:
Let’s see how this works out, and congratulations to the team for a great product!!!
UPDATE
I just found a couple more very interesting blog posts that cover the new WLW and its SDK…
http://scottisafooldev.spaces.live.com/blog/
Worth mentioning especially for those interested in developing in the SDK…