We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Writer Beta is available for download today. 

 
Windows Live Writer Beta (14.0.5025.904)

Here’s what you can expect to find in this beta:

Image and video publishing enhancements

• Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
• Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Blog authoring enhancements

• Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

Experience improvements

For those of you who downloaded the Technical Preview and have used Writer in the last couple of days, you may have seen a notification to upgrade to the new version only to be directed to http://get.live.com/writer to find that there is nothing new to install.

On Monday (September 1, 2008) the Technical Preview of Writer started erroneously triggering expiration for October 1, 2008.  We have fixed the issue that was causing the false expiration.  While the Technical Preview of Writer will not expire on October 1, you may still see this notification again. 

When you see this notification, click the “Ask Me Later” button and you will be able to continue using Writer without any change.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

The Windows Live Writer Team

Members of the Writer team will be at BlogHer ‘08 in San Francisco this Friday through Sunday. 

In addition to roaming around the sessions, we’ll be presenting and leading round-table discussion about Writer at the Microsoft-hosted breakfast series on Saturday from 8:15 – 9:15 AM.  We’re told that in addition to breakfast (of course) attendees will receive SWAG bags that include a bunch of fun stuff such as: Mini Cams, copies of Windows Live One Care (one yr. free subscription) and a few copies of Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, Windows Live and some other stuff.

Feel free to pull us aside or stop by the breakfast series on Saturday and say “hi”. We’re looking forward to meeting and talking with as many of you as we can.

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