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New Windows Live Writer?

Written by Josh on Monday, September 1st, 2008

The Windows Live development team released a technical preview of Live Writer about 3 months ago. The release was predominately to test the new Writer SKD for creating plug-ins.

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).

The release also introduced a number of great enhancements which personally I find much more useful then plug-ins. I didn’t encounter many issues apart from an annoying bug which randomly inserts a number of lines of paragraph tags.

After this release there was no more news from the developers so I pretty much even forgot this was a beta release. This morning however I got this message:

I presume this means Windows Live Wave 3 isn’t far away? I hope the final release of Writer includes some additional features not present in the technical preview, even if it doesn’t. Live Writer still remains the best offline blog editor available.

Update: I totally take that back. I actually tried the sample plugins which came with the new SKD and they’re great!

Activate the Twitter plugin and here’s what it will do whenever you post a blog entry: