Great post on how to develop a plug-in for Windows Live Writer

I do not write enough about how to develop a plug-in for Windows Live Writer and I should try and work on that in 2011.  Microsoftie Dan Waters took time out from blogging about the Cloud to write up a post about writing a Twitter plug-in that supports bit.ly including how to set things up on Visual Studio.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dawate/archive/2010/12/30/how-to-create-a-windows-live-writer-twitter-plugin-that-supports-bit-ly.aspx

Twitter Notify which can be found on http://plugin.live.com supports many URL shorteners but not out of the box.  You can read about how to modify it and the app to do so in a post I did earlier in the year.

Dan’s plug-in can also be found on http://plugin.live.com.

Happy Holidays

This is a bit late for those that celebrate Hanukkah but Happy Holidays to all of the Windows Live Writer users out there.  Merry Christmas and Kwanzaa.  Enjoy your Boxing Day or Festivus (for the rest of us). 

Have a great New Year.

Autocorrect for a language other than English in Live Writer 2011 (and Live Mail) using Office 2010

NOTE: This should ONLY be tried with Office 2010.  DO NOT try with this Office 2007, Office 2003, or Office 97 files.  I have no idea if Live Writer will crash or have undesired affects using older version of Office files and I do not want to have to track down crashes for something that is unsupported in general.

First read the note above!  Second this is NOT supported so use at your own risk.  I have high confidence that this will work with Office 2010 files since Windows Live Writer 2011 used the same autocorrect file as Office 2010 but we only tested with the English file so there is a minor chance that a localize file might not work.

In a previous post I explained how to add additional dictionaries for use with Live Writer.  In Microsoft Office, the applications with keep in sync a localized autocorrect list that matches the editing language and dictionary assuming there is an autocorrect list for that language (sometimes they use English when autocorrect does not make sense for a language and sometimes they do nothing at all).  In Live Writer regardless of what dictionary you are using, or what your UI you are using, your autocorrect will always be in English.  If you own Office 2010 and you really want to use a localized autocorrect list here is how you do it.  I should note that this will change the built in autocorrect list and not the custom autocorrect list you can create and use with Office.  Live Writer does not support a custom autocorrect list.  Second note is that this will change your autocorrect list for Live Mail in addition to Live Writer.  Please make sure you want to have it replaced and used in both applications.

1. Verify that you have Office 2010 – if you do not then please stop reading now.
2. Navigate to your “Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Dictionaries\” folder
3. Rename mso.acl to mso.bak – this way you can go back to your original file
4. Navigate to your “Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14” folder
5. Navigate to folder for the Locale ID (LCID) for the language that that you want to use.  Office use LCID as defined in the table found on Locale IDs assigned by Microsoft.  Look at that list and find the LCID that matches the language you want to use.  Live Writer ships with English – 1033.  Here is a subset of that list including many of the common languages that Windows Live Writer is localized to:
   
   

   Language – Country/Region	LCID Dec
   Arabic – Saudi Arabia	1025
   Basque	1069
   Bulgarian	1026
   Catalan	1027
   Croatian	1050
   Czech	1029
   Dutch – Netherlands	1043
   English – United States	1033
   English – United Kingdom	2057
   English – Australia	3081
   English – Canada	4105
   Estonian	1061
   Finnish	1035
   French – France	1036
   German – Germany	1031
   German – Switzerland	2055
   Greek	1032
   Hebrew	1037
   Hungarian	1038
   Italian – Italy	1040
   Japanese	1041
   Korean	1042
   Latvian	1062
   Lithuanian	1063
   Malay – Malaysia	1086
   Polish	1045
   Portuguese – Brazil	1046
   Portuguese – Portugal	2070
   Romanian	1048
   Russian	1049
   Serbian (Cyrillic)	3098
   Serbian (Latin)	2074
   Slovak	1051
   Slovenian	1060
   Spanish – Spain (Modern Sort)	3082
   Spanish – Mexico	2058
   Swedish	1053
   Turkish	1055
   Ukrainian	1058

   So if you wanted to use the French autocorrect list you would go to the 1036 folder

6. Copy the mso.acl file from that folder to the “Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Dictionaries\” folder

7. Boot Writer and try a word that you know will autocorrect for that language.  For example, with French if you type “contr ece” it should autocorrect to “contre ce”.

To switch back, just rename mso.back to mso.acl.  Note that running setup to, say, switch your UI language or to upgrade your Windows Live Writer could revert the mso.acl file back to English.   A repair operation could also set it back to English.

As stated above this is unsupported however I know that many users would like to have autocorrect that matches their editing and UI language. 

How to configure your SINA blog to work with windows Live Writer

A few weeks ago it was announced that Microsoft had partnered with SINA.com in China to migrate Live Spaces to their blogging service.  There is also cool integration with the sina micro-blogging service which is kind of like Twitter in the rest of the world and Live Messenger. A surprise to our team was that at the same time SINA completed some work on their servers so that they could “talk” with Windows Live Writer. 

Hopefully I can find someone to do a solid translation of this blog post to Simplified Chinese but at least I can give you the pictures on how to configure your SINA blog with Windows Live Writer.

When you first start Live Writer you see this dialog.  From here select the “Other” option and select Next.

 

In this dialog enter the URL for your blog on SINA.  “BlogAccount” is the part of the URL that will be unique to your blog.  Mostly likely your Userneame will be the same as your “BlogAccount” and you will most likely need to include “@sina.cn” as part of the Username.  The Password will be your standard password you use with your sina account.  You can choose to save this information so you do not have to enter it again.  Next click next.

 

 

You might be prompted to have your blog theme detected which you can answer Yes or No.  After that the last step is to give your blog a friendly name which is only shown in the Blog accounts drop down list in Live Writer.

What features should be added to Windows Live Writer?

At the end of every product cycle and after a product has been released to manufacturing or released to web the next logical step is to start to plan for the next version.  Of course in reality planning starts before product release and continues throughout the development milestones.

The question of the day and this post is “What features should be added to Windows Live Writer?”

Things I would like you to think about before you answer is what are features that are great for all bloggers?  For example “you should add replace to go along with the find feature”.  The other is what features do you selfishly want added? For example, “I do not care about Blogger users I want shortcode support for WordPress” or “clearly you need support for Posterous to be added to Live Writer”.  Also if there is something that you consider a “bug” that you would like to see fixed that would be great to hear about also.  In that case please be as detailed as possible.  It is not helpful to read something like “fix the fact that as everyone knows Live Writer uses <div> in tables incorrectly” (I made this example up but I hope it proves the point I am trying to make in that give as much detail as possible with examples).

I hope that the post fills with comments as I love to listen to your ideas.  I guess I should add that there is never any guarantee that any of your suggestions will make the next version.  Also I guess (I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on television) that by making a comment you are putting your idea(s) into the public domain so that anyone can use it.  The world of blogging is always changing.  Blog servers make changes monthly or even weekly.  New services appear and disappear.  We do our best to keep up while still keeping things compatible with the past.

Update: I am going to lock the comments on this post after 12/26.  I will be passing the feedback onto the team planning future work.

New version of Windows Live Writer fixes AltGr issue

A new build (15.4.3508.1109) of Windows Live Writer 2011 was released today for the primary reason to fix an issue with using the AltGr key on many keyboards used worldwide.  Just about five weeks ago we started to receive reports that AltGr+1 or any number 1-6 or AltGr+V was not having the desired effect.  Here is what should have happened for a few different keyboards:

Keyboard	AltGr+1	AltGr+2	AltGr+3	AltGr+4	AltGr+5
Spanish	|	@	#	~	€
Swedish		@	£	$	€
French		~	#	{	[
Swiss German	¦	@	#	°	§

Instead of the expected character this would get mapped to the ribbon shortcuts since AltGr really is the equivalent to Alt+Ctrl.  For 1-6 it would map to changing your HTML style and for “V” it would do a paste special.  If you were trying to type an email address with the “@” symbol or type a currency symbol it would be very frustrating.  Overall this affected 103 different keyboards used in over 400 locations worldwide.

The built in virtual keyboards that come with the operating system do not generally show this issue and you needed to have a real keyboard with an AltGr key.  My question to our beta testers is why did y’all not see this in your testing?  What can we do different in the future with a beta to help find these type of bugs assuming we cannot find them in-house?  The beta was released in at least three countries where the standard keyboard has an AltGr key.

Why is spelling greyed out for me in Windows Live Writer?

I have really been ignoring what search terms land people at my blog but there are a lot of things that it looks like people might need help with that I have not blogged about yet.  One of the search terms from yesterday was “spell check greyed out in Live Writer”. 

 

If you ever run into this, what has happened is your dictionary language has been set to “(None)”.  I cannot explain why this might be the case but there is an easy fix.  Bring up the Options dialog (drop the Blog accounts drop down and select Manage blog accounts) and then select Spelling and then select the dictionary language you want to check spelling in.  The Spelling option will no longer be greyed out in the ribbon.

Submission process for Plug-ins has been made easier

This summer plug-in developers for Windows Live Writer were contacted that changes were coming to how you would submit plug-ins for hosting in the gallery.  Based off of feedback, the process has been refined and it should be easier now to submit plug-ins.  The process has also been consolidated so that if you are authoring a plug-in for Live Writer, Photo Gallery, or Movie Maker it all works the same way.

Plug-in submission process:

1. Author emails wleplugins@microsoft.com (Windows Live Essentials Plug-ins) including the following information:
   • Author name
   • Author contact email address
   • Plug-in name
   • Plug-in description
   • Plug-in primary language (ex: English; if your plug-in supports multiple languages, please choose one)
   • Writer plug-in category (if your plug-in works with Windows Live Writer, pick exactly one):
     • Buttons
     • Formatting / clipboard
     • Miscellaneous
     • Other content insertion
     • Photos and videos
     • Post publishing
   • Photo Gallery plug-in category (if your plug-in works with Windows Live Photo Gallery, pick exactly one):
     • Publishing
   • Movie Maker plug-in category (if your plug-in works with Windows Live Movie Maker, pick exactly one):
     • Publishing
   • Plug-in tags (up to five sets of one or two words that best describe the plug-in)
   • Plug-in installer MSI file. This can be zipped and attached to your email (the MSI must be within a zip file) or you can provide a link to the file online (you could upload it to Windows Live SkyDrive for example).
2. Windows Live team adds new/updated plug-in information and MSI installer to this website.
3. Windows Live team notifies plug-in author that plug-in has been listed/updated.

 

Here are links to the SDKs for Live Writer, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker:

• Windows Live Photo Gallery Publishing Plug-in Platform (includes information about Movie Maker)
• Windows Live Writer Plugin API

Paint.NET updates to work with Windows Live Writer 2011

Feedback we have received a fair amount about is that Windows Live Writer 2011 does not work with Paint.NET whereas the previous version of Live Writer worked fine.  Anything copied from Paint.NET and pasted in Writer would do nothing in 2011.  About a week ago Paint.Net produced an update that now works with Live Writer 2011.  Go download build 3.6.5 3.5.6 or later of Paint.NET and you should be able to copy and paste those images right into your favorite blogging application.

Update: I had the build number wrong.  It is 3.5.6, not 3.6.5.

Adding additional dictionaries to Live Writer

While Windows Live Writer only will spell check in one language at a time, you can add additional dictionaries so you can check your blog post for spelling errors beyond the language in which you installed Live Writer.  Currently there are 33 base languages that you install a dictionary for (see the table at the bottom of this post).  Some dictionaries support differences depending on how words are spelled in that country, for example, the English dictionary will spell check words for United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

To add an additional dictionary for Live Writer you need to install the language setting for Windows Live that you would like to use.  In your Windows Control Panel select Clock, Language, and Region.  Here you will see Windows Live Language Setting.  Click to run this application and then select the location for the dictionary you want to install.  This will run the setup program so complete the install.  When it is done you need to go back into the Windows Live Language Setting application and select the language that you originally installed.  This will run a very quick setup program.  If you do not do this, when you run Live Writer it will show your entire user interface (UI) in the new language you pick and not the original one you installed.  You can repeat this process to add as many dictionaries as you need.

  

After you have installed the new dictionary you can set it as the default or switch dictionaries in the Options dialog.  Drop down the Blog accounts drop down and select Manage Blog accounts. In the Options dialog select Spelling and then you can select from the list of installed dictionaries. Below shows the English and Spanish dictionaries installed.

 

List of dictionaries you can install for Windows Live Writer

Language	Language ID
Arabic	ar
Basque	eu
Bulgarian	bg
Catalan	ca
Croatian (Latin)	hr
Czech	cs
Dutch	nl
English	en
Estonian	et
Finnish	fi
French	fr
German	de
Greek	el
Hebrew	he
Hungarian	hu
Italian	it
Korean	ko
Latvian	lv
Lithuanian	lt
Malay	ms
Polish	pl
Portuguese (Brazil)	pt-br
Portuguese	pt-pt
Romanian	ro
Russian	ru
Serbian (Cyrillic)	sr-cyrl-cs
Serbian (Latin)	cr-latn-cs
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Spanish	es
Swedish	sv
Turkish	tr
Ukrainian	uk