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Windows Live Writer Beta Announced (incl. Mini-Review)

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Finally the public Beta of Windows Live Writer has been announced, this tools has been available in pre-Beta builds for a few weeks internally to I'm going to give a few impressions from my personal usage. You can download Windows Live Writer at https://download.microsoft.com/download/f/9/a/f9a19f2d-cec4-4a25-9b0b-eb9655ea7561/Writer.msi, the team has a blog at https://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com.

  • Easy configuration: When I asked it to connect to my blog on MSDN (running Community Server) it was a simple "click Next"-wizard and then it was done. It even downloaded my Categories and allows me to set the locally. More info on supported blog software is available at the Writer Zone.
  • Spellchecking: Previously I was writing my texts in Word (Office 2003) so I had spellchecking, but then you create the post on the web and make some changes and then spellchecking is gone. With Windows Live Writer I get WYSIWYG authoring AND spellchecking of last minute changes. Also note that it you have checked part of the document it doesn't recheck that again unless you make changes, so you don't have to Ignore all those errors on URLs etc. more than once.
  • Multiple editing views: You can edit in both WYSIWYG (Normal View) and HTML View. There are other views as well, but I haven't used them.
  • Draft publishing: It's easy to post a Draft, which is what I normally do. I prefer to upload my posts as Draft and then edit publishing date manually (unless something needs to be published ASAP, as this post).  
  • Windows Live Writer SDK: There is an SDK for those of you who wish to create plug-ins.

What's missing if I look at my blogging workflow?

  • No table support: I have not found any support for creating tables in my posts while editing them in Normal View. To create a table I have to go to HTML View and add the <table>-tags myself. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in later versions.
  • Control publish date/time: As I mentioned before I usually upload my posts before they are published. If I have a way of controlling the publishing date/time from within Windows Live Writer it would eliminate the step where I go to the blog admin console and change this property.

As I'm a blogger with only two month experience I haven't tried other tools, so I cannot compare Windows Live Writer to other tools. But after using the tool for several week I can say that it's easy to use and has improved my blogging experience.