Windows Live Writer Released
I slept in this morning and woke up to find that the product we’ve been working on, Windows Live Writer, was revealed a day early due to word leaking out about it. The blogosphere is starting to talk about it but at this writing it’s still early yet.
We had this project simmering on a back burner for a long time at Onfolio, as we were really excited about it but couldn’t convince ourselves there was a business plan for it. I’m so glad Microsoft saw potential in Writer–it would be a real shame if WYSIWYG* blog editing had never seen the light of day.
I’d like to give a quick tip of the hat to Tim Heuer, a Microsoft employee who blogged about us today. As soon as Tim received the internal build of Writer, he started reverse engineering our plugin API (before we had finished writing the documentation for it) and whipped out a Flickr plugin the very next day. He’s also provided us with a lot of great feedback throughout the dogfooding process and I think our product is a lot better for it. Of course there were many other dogfooders who gave us great feedback (thank you all!) and even several who also wrote cool plugins, but Tim was there first and banged on our door loudest. So, thanks Tim!
* Maybe we need to come up with a different way to say WYSIWYG, to reflect the fact that we take the styles from your blog–maybe “styled WYSIWYG”? Ugh, that’s just terrible…
Filed under: Uncategorized | 24 Comments
hi joe!
you asked me to look why the image doesn’t show up and send you an e-mail if I think it’s a bug at Writer.
well, I actually think it’s a bug at Writer, probably with the update functionality.
the image worked initially, I then updated the post twice or so by re-publishing it. I’m sure that it worked after the first re-publishing, because that first time was because the image didn’t work as expected.
at the last re-publishing, there must have been a problem, because obviously it didn’t update correctly.
I did now again re-publish it and it works again. I didn’t change anything in Writer.
I hope I helped.
damned, I didn’t check my e-mails – your e-mail was included there.
I will send you a better bug-report.
Hi Sebastian, an Onfolio party here hey.
It worked. First shot. What a great tool.
Oh.. those wasted LOCs :C
Sorry guys, maybe, after 100s of plugins, and 20 more versions I’ll start to see the point of this off-line-online blogging thingie.
That’s fine. If you’re happy using web forms or TinyMCE to edit your posts, hey, more power to you. Plenty of other people are looking for something faster and easier, and we’ll content ourselves with trying to make them happy.
Good… the war is began
Please fix your proxy support in Windows Live Writer. I come across this problem very often with products that run fine at home but badly on corporate-style networks. In this case there is an Microsoft ISA proxy server in place and I can’t configure the proxy setting to work correctly.
Brian, we’re looking into this. In the meantime, we have a similar setup here at Microsoft and if you install ISA Client then Writer (and all other apps) can work correctly. Not sure if the same applies in your corporate network but if it does and you are able to do it, it might be worth a shot. NOTE: I am not an ISA Server expert, proceed at your own risk.
Thanks for your reply Joe. The ISA client is not installed on any machines at this location. In fact, ISA is probably only one of many servers that an HTTP request passes through at work (big enterprise, 64k people, healthcare so security is a major thing).
Lutz Roeder at Microsoft added proxy support to his popular .NET reflector tool (http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/). Not sure how he added this, but it works very well here
It picks up the IE proxy settings and uses correct Windows authentication etc.
Thanks for the tip, Brian! I’m sure Lutz can help us save a lot of investigation time.
I am very curious to learn if you folks have a good reason to have your own proxy settings, rather than using the system (IE) proxy settings. I notice Live Messenger does this as well, but I can’t think of any good reason for it. It’s exceedingly easy to use the system proxy from managed code, and to use CredUI to prompt for credentials if necessary.
Brent, I’ll leave a reply on your blog post.
Nevermind Brent, I see that Spike has responded already.
TO JoeCheng : Are you real Joe Cheng ? Or Joe Cheng’s fan ?