Catherine Heller (Channel 9) interviews Charles Teague (our Dev Lead) on Windows Live Writer.
 
Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

You can now install the latest technical preview of Windows Live Writer.  Here's what you’ll find in this release:

SDK Updates

This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events.

PLEASE NOTE: These updates are experimental and the APIs are not final--we may make changes based on your feedback that break plug-ins that use these new methods. Further, you will not be able to upload plugins that use the updated SDK to Windows Live Gallery.

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). 

In the SDK Technical Preview you’ll find the following:

• New SDK Features.doc – Detailed descriptions of the new plugin types. (Start here!)
• SDK Reference.chm – Reference documentation for the entire Windows Live Writer API.
• Samples – Source and binaries for two sample plugins:
  • Twitter Notify – Prompts you to make a Twitter status update after publishing a post
  • DiggThis – Automatically adds a DiggThis button or badge to each post

Known Issues

In our final testing of the Plugin SDK Technical Preview, we found a few issues we’d like to make you aware of.

• The “SDK Reference.chm” contents may not load, due to security restrictions in Windows. If this happens to you, follow the instructions in “SDK Reference README.txt” to unblock the file.
• For header/footer sources, returning null from GeneratePreviewHtml or GeneratePublishHtml will cause an error in Writer. Return the empty string instead.
• According to the “New SDK Features.doc”, content source plugins can now read the title, body, and other properties from the active blog post. In this release, support for this scenario is incomplete.

New Features

You’ll also get an early look at some improvements and new in-product features we’ve been working on. To get more details read the blog post.

Send Feedback

We look forward to hearing your feedback about this release. The following resources are available to you for providing feedback to the Writer team:

• For feedback about the Technical Preview, please use our Windows Live Writer (Beta) Forum.
• For feedback about the SDK, please use our Windows Live Writer Developer Forums.

We hope you enjoy the Technical Preview!

The Windows Live Writer Team

The Picasa Data API newsgroup has reported they have fixed the issue that was causing posts that contain images to not publish on Blogger (thanks Jeff Fisher for the quick response!).  We have verified that the fix does addresses the issue Writer was having publishing to Blogger.

If you continue to have problems with Writer please post on our newsgroup.

Thanks to everyone for their patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

Today, the Writer team learned of changes to Blogger that cause Writer to fail when publishing posts that contain images.  When attempting to publish a post that contains images, Writer will show the following message:

We're currently investigating a fix for this issue and will post an update as soon as we have more information.

Thanks to everyone who reported this issue.

Thank you to everyone who tried out the beta releases of Writer over the last year and gave us feedback. Over 1.5 million of you downloaded our last beta release, and your input helped make Writer the product it is today. 

Our goal from the start has been to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Today, we’re proud to announce that Windows Live Writer 2008 is now available!

 
Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026)

Most of our work over the last few months has been focused on raising the quality of Writer and putting the final fit and finish on the product. However, there are still a few new features in this release to check out: 

Easier Spaces creation and configuration
Whether or not you already have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, now all you need is a Windows Live ID username and password to configure Writer to your Spaces blog.

Spell checking in four languages
This includes three flavors of English dictionaries:

1. English (US, UK, Canadian)
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish

Generic AtomPub Support
Configuration and publishing to services that implement Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0.

We have heard from many of you about the pain and frustration in the last beta release when support for installing on x64 systems was not supported.  We're happy to share that this has also been fixed and now installation on Windows Vista x64 is fully supported.

As always, we're eager to hear feedback and learn about what you like and what you don't like.

Later this week you'll have an opportunity to tell us in person. Members of the Writer team will be attending BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas.  We’ll have a product booth with this release of Writer for all to try. Come by and chat with us!

The Windows Live Writer Team

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