Writer Zone: Writer News

Windows Live Writer Gets Love at BlogHer Business 2008

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:11:58 GMT

Here's some live footage from the Microsoft Windows Experience Lounge during the 2008 BlogHer Business Conference. Thanks Sara Ford!!

One correction to the video: Writer is not in Beta anymore. You can install the official "out of beta" version at http://writer.live.com/.

Live From the Microsoft Windows Experience Lounge

Windows Live Writer: Out of Beta

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:51:42 GMT

Thank you to everyone who tried out the beta releases of Writer over the last year and gave us feedback. Over 1.5 million of you downloaded our last beta release, and your input helped make Writer the product it is today.

Our goal from the start has been to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Today, we’re proud to announce that Windows Live Writer 2008 is now available!

Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026)

Most of our work over the last few months has been focused on raising the quality of Writer and putting the final fit and finish on the product. However, there are still a few new features in this release to check out:

Easier Spaces creation and configuration
Whether or not you already have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, now all you need is a Windows Live ID username and password to configure Writer to your Spaces blog.

Spell checking in four languages
This includes three flavors of English dictionaries:

English (US, UK, Canadian)
French
German
Spanish

Generic AtomPub Support
Configuration and publishing to services that implement Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0.

We have heard from many of you about the pain and frustration in the last beta release when support for installing on x64 systems was not supported. We're happy to share that this has also been fixed and now installation on Windows Vista x64 is fully supported.

As always, we're eager to hear feedback and learn about what you like and what you don't like.

Later this week you'll have an opportunity to tell us in person. Members of the Writer team will be attending BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. We’ll have a product booth with this release of Writer for all to try. Come by and chat with us!

The Windows Live Writer Team

Talk to us
Send feedback
Contact support

Writer will be at BlogWorld Expo

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:14:19 GMT

Later this week member of the Writer team will be attending BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, NV.

You can find us hanging out at our product booth. We’ll have a computer with the latest version of Writer available for “test drives”.

We’re looking forward to talking with folks and hearing what you think about Writer.
If you’re planning on going to the conference, please stop by!

Welcome Stephan to the MVPs!

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:25:28 GMT

Congratulations to Stephan Walcher, one of Microsoft's newest MVPs! (The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program recognizes leaders among our users who voluntarily share their knowledge and expertise with the community.)

Stephan started the German-language Live Writer Blog. This popular site features the latest Writer news, workarounds for known problems, and reviews of Writer plugins. He's also a regular on the Writer MSN Group.

From all of us on the Writer team, thanks for all you do for the Writer community--and congratulations again!

Upcoming Changes May Affect Plug-in Developers

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:56:12 GMT

In an upcoming release of Windows Live Writer, we are changing the location that Windows Live Writer’s program files are installed into as well as the location of our registry settings. These changes could have an impact upon plug-in authors, though we have done our best to maintain backward compatibility. This post describes the changes in more detail and specifically discusses the impact that this will have upon existing plug-ins.

Another Blogger Beta Update

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:47:31 GMT

We’ve had a month of blissful trouble-free integration, but today’s update of Blogger Beta is giving Windows Live Writer indigestion.

As far as we know, if you're already using Build 145 and it's working with Blogger Beta, it should continue to work. But if you try to add a new Blogger Beta blog, you'll likely find that style detection will fail and none of the posts you publish will actually show up on the blog.

We're working on an update to address this issue, which we plan to deliver sometime next week. Sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll keep you posted.

Joe Cheng
Developer, Windows Live Writer

(Thanks to JTB for initially reporting this issue.)