For the last three and a half years, it’s been my distinct pleasure to be part of the Windows Live Writer team. It’s been deeply satisfying to help ship this simple yet sophisticated program that has put a smile on so many bloggers’ faces. From our first public beta, we’ve had nothing but love from the blogging community, and I can’t tell you how awesome that feels.

So it’s with decidedly mixed emotions that I’m moving on from Microsoft and Windows Live Writer. My last day is this Friday, 9/11/2009.

Thank you to all the colleagues, partners, and especially users who have made the last few years so exciting and rewarding. It’s been an amazing experience for me, and I’ll always be proud of what we accomplished.

Next for me will be another stint working for JJ Allaire. I’ll be working from home, which will be something new for me. No details to share about the project for a while, except to say that it will be something totally different (nothing to do with blogging, sorry).

Last September, our Development Lead and all-around great guy Charles left the Windows Live Writer team for the greener pastures of venture capitalism. (In Microsoft parlance, Development Leads manage developers, while Development Managers manage development leads.) With mixed feelings, I stepped into his role—my first time being a manager, not counting a few ill-fated months in 2001 that I’d rather forget.

I couldn’t have been happier as a developer on Writer. There’s something simple and pure about creating features, fixing bugs, and solving customer problems. A good day meant that when I went home, Writer did something cool that it didn’t do when I had arrived in the morning.

Being a lead, so far, has been anything but simple, even though I’m only managing two developers. I’m finding it much harder to measure my contribution or to even know what’s the most important thing to work on at any given moment. “Time management” for me used to mean making sure I don’t spend too much time on YouTube or TechMeme. Now it means having 12 hours a day worth of work each day I could be doing, and deciding what subset of it I’m actually going to spend time on. It means deciding which of the three meetings I have scheduled for 1PM I will actually go to. All the while knowing that things I’m leaving undone, and the meetings that I’m deciding are not as important, all have the potential to bite me in the back down the road.

And that work, and those meetings, are not always clear and simple like building a feature or fixing a bug. I spend a lot of time these days just “getting on the same page” as people. Having arguments without reaching clear resolution. Planning to plan. How do you measure whether you’ve been successful at these kind of things? How do you determine the impact on the product, on your users?

Messy.

That all being said, I’m glad to have this opportunity. Going up the steep part of any learning curve is by definition both challenging and rewarding. To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve hit any really steep learning curves as a developer. And even after this short time, I’m starting to get comfortable in the role and learn how to find real satisfaction in what I’m doing.

Over the past few months I’ve gotten some great management advice from some great managers. I’ve also had some thoughts percolating for some time, that being a lead has helped crystallize. I hope to blog as I learn, partly to give some food for thought for other new managers out there, but mostly as a journal I can look back on after a few years, and wonder at how naïve I was.

Update Feb 13 2009: The updated version of Writer that fixes this problem is now available. You can upgrade to version 14.0.8064.206 from our usual download page.

Ack. We’ve had a few users report that they’re getting into a state where Windows Live Writer 2009 can no longer start. They see the splash screen, then an error, then nothing.

We’re getting ready to ship an update that fixes the problem, but in the meantime, there is a straightforward workaround to get Writer running again:

1. Start | Run
2. On Vista, enter this command:
   %AppData%\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
   On XP, enter this command:
   %UserProfile%\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
3. You should see a bunch of files whose names begin with “keyword” and end with lots of letters and numbers. Delete all of these files.

That should fix it.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is that one of these files is getting corrupted. This is due to a race condition in our code where the settings file can be closed while it’s still in the middle of being written. Our update will both fix the race condition, and also deal more gracefully with corrupted settings files (by ignoring them).

Fortunately, these files merely contain a copy of tags that are also stored on your server. After you delete these files, you may find that our server-side tagging feature no longer suggests tags to you. You can get your tags back by hitting the little refresh button (two arrows chasing each other) right inside the “Set tags” textbox.

Hopefully, folks who use both Windows Live Writer and Twitter know about the Twitter Notify plugin we released in December. Out of the box, it uses the venerable (but still awesome) TinyURL service to shorten the URL to your blog post.

However, if you prefer a different URL shortening service, like is.gd or snipr, you might be able to get the plugin to use that instead, with a simple registry tweak.

Under the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft
    \Windows Live\Writer\Preferences\PostEditor\ContentSources
    \CECF2903-51B3-4173-A932-76E4EE4C01CF

Add a String Value called UrlShortener. Here are some examples of known good values:

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url={0}
http://is.gd/api.php?longurl={0}
http://snipr.com/site/snip?r=simple&link={1}
http://snurl.com/site/snip?r=simple&link={1}
http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?url={1}

The plugin will replace {0} or {1} with the URL of your post. ({0} will just drop the URL in, while {1} will URL-encode the URL first. The latter seems more correct, but TinyURL and is.gd both expect the former.) Then it will make a web request to the resulting URL, and assume that the entire response is the shortened URL.

Not all URL shortening services will work. For example, bit.ly has an API but it returns JSON or XML, not just the bare URL, so at best you’ll get a bunch of garbage in the post.

You can also choose to skip the shortening step and just put the whole URL in there; just create the UrlShortener string value but leave it empty.

Windows Live Writer 2009 went final last week during CES. (It’s actually the same bits as the RC [14.0.8050.1202] since no show stopping bugs were found since then.)

If you’re still on an older build of Writer, go download it now!

Ever since WordPress 2.3 hit the scene, adding native tagging support, there’s been some (understandable) confusion as to whether Windows Live Writer supports tags, and how it relates to WP native tags. Hopefully this post will clear things up.

If you’re using WordPress 2.3.1 or later, look for either Keywords or Tags near the bottom of the screen. You may first have to press F2 (or click the little up-arrow) to expand the property panel.

Better yet, if you’re using WordPress 2.7 (or WordPress.com) and Windows Live Writer 2009 RC or later, you’ll get tag autocompletion! The tags field also moves upwards, adjacent to the categories field.

The same instructions apply for BlogEngine.NET, though I don’t think a build has been formally released yet that supports tag autocompletion.

The confusion stems from the fact that there is also an older, non-native style of tagging that was in common use in 2006 when we launched Writer. At the time, none of the popular blog platforms had any built-in tagging features, per se—it was all about categories. Tagging usually meant manually inserting HTML links into the actual body of each post, with rel="tag" attributes on each link. Technorati and other search engines could detect these tags, but because it was all commingled within the post body, the actual blogging platforms could not.

The second public beta of Writer added support for this primitive form of tagging, and it remains in the product to this day. If you do “Insert Tags” from the main menu, edit toolbar, or sidebar, you’ll get this kind of tagging. And if your blog software supports native tags, as WordPress does, this is almost certainly not what you want.

It’s definitely bogus that we have two related-but-different tagging features, without making it easy for the user to know which to use. We didn’t have time to solve this problem for WLW 2009, but it’s quite possible we will do something about it in a future release.

In case you’re wondering what the “instant photo” border treatment feature is, here’s an example.

It plays nice with the Crop and Tilt features.

No, you cannot currently provide a caption to be written on the border. If that’s important to you, you might consider the “Polaroid Picture” plug-in.

(Sorry, I’m a bit late with this post, as we went live with the RC on Monday morning.)

Windows Live Essentials 2009 RC has shipped, including a new drop of Writer. Here’s a fairly generic announcement from the official Windows Live blog. Check out the post on the Writer team blog for a complete list of new features since the last beta.

Here’s some coverage from labnol, Lifehacker, live-writer.de (German).

And my customary list of highlights and lowlights:

Highlights

• Spell checking in more languages. Users have been asking us for more spell checkers for a long time. Due to a combination of contractual and technical reasons, we haven’t been able to deliver—until now.
• Server-side tagging. As a WordPress user myself, this means I can finally start using tags instead of just categories. BlogEngine.NET users can get in on the fun too.
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog. The Open dialog is one of the more neglected corners of Writer. It’s always been difficult to find old posts you want to edit—the older, the harder. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier. (And by the way, Spaces users can finally look at more than just the 20 most recent posts.)
• More AtomPub under the covers. Though there are no new features to speak of for 3rd party AtomPub servers, some might be happy to know that Writer now uses AtomPub to blog on Windows Live Spaces and to publish images and photo albums to SkyDrive. (These AtomPub services aren’t available for 3rd party developers to use—yet.)
• Performance. We took a big bite out of startup time and removed a lot of latency from general text editing.
• Photo albums. Just look at that, come on!! You have to admit that’s pretty sweet!

View Full Album

• Windows Server 2008 officially supported. See? We do listen to user feedback! You can all stop sending me hate mail now. (Not you Windows Server 2003 users, you guys can keep sending it.)
• New support forum. We finally got off the horribly antiquated MSN Spaces, and onto a modern forum platform. Check out our new digs here.

Lowlights

• Photo album performance. If you drop images straight out of your 12-megapixel camera into a photo album, it can take several seconds for us to draw the splashy thumbnail. This was the best performance we were able to eke out with the technology we had on hand (GDI+). Clearly we have lots of room for improvement here.
• Low-res support. Netbooks are all the rage this year, and some parts of our UI were not designed for a 600-pixel vertical screen resolution. For example, some options on the image sidebar are simply inaccessible.

On a more reflective note, this was the first full milestone (Beta to RC) we did without Charles Teague, our dev lead and voice of reason since the earliest days of Onfolio, who left the team and Microsoft this past September to join a Boston-based VC firm. While we do sorely miss his leadership, it’s gratifying to see that our team has continued to thrive even in his absence. What can I say… he taught us well.

I’ve posted workarounds before to make the Firefox Blog This plugin for Windows Live Writer work for Firefox 3.0 and later. Now we’ve finally taken the first (public) steps to solving this problem the right way.

Our revised extension is now available on addons.mozilla.org. We’re currently in their “Sandbox” which means you will have to log in to download the extension. After enough people download it and write reviews (please!), we’ll be allowed to nominate the extension for graduation from the Sandbox. At that point we’ll take down the older version of the plugin from gallery.live.com and announce the new plugin on our team blog.

By the way, there is no new functionality in this version, other than an updated (Windows Live 2009 style) icon.

Sorry for making you wait for six months for this. Our (and especially my) bad!

I’m about 14 hours late with this blog post—at noon today, we officially released the first beta of the Windows Live “Wave 3” client suite, and that means a new release of Windows Live Writer. It’s all available—for free, of course—at http://download.live.com.

For a list of the new features in this release, you’ll want to refer to the official Writer blog post. Personally, I’m really excited about the new look and feel—whereas the old Writer skin called a lot of attention to itself, the new skin just gets out of the way and lets you focus on your content.

Under the covers, a ton of bugs have been fixed, in many different areas across the app. If you’ve had trouble with a previous version of Writer, I’d encourage you to try again with the new beta, and if it still doesn’t work, be sure to let us know in our forum.

On a sour note, we found a new bug last night that causes blog configuration to fail for certain (mostly less-popular) blog types. When blog configuration is almost finished, a crash occurs and you’re unable to complete the blog configuration wizard. We’ve spent today taking steps to mitigate the problem, so hopefully most people won’t encounter it. If you do happen to see a crash in the blog configuration wizard, restart Writer and try again. If it still happens, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Thanks—and keep the feedback coming!