Long long ago, in a warmer state that is far far away…

I started a blog.  The reality of the blog was that I spent more time updating the code of the blog than I did creating content.  I use the blog as a test bed for various projects, ideas and patterns.  But once upon a time, I did create content.

I don’t always create content but when I do, I use Windows Live Writer.

One of my early decisions was that I did not want to spend time creating a blogging UI.  I knew there were really good blog editing programs that supported a rich text editor and an offline mode.  So I looked into what was needed to support them.  That was when I found the MetaBlogAPI and Windows Live Writer.  I quickly built a c# implementation of the MetaBlogApi and started blogging away about membership and roles and the need to support rights…

Which brings me back to what I wanted to talk about, Windows Live Writer Plugins.

One night in 2010 I wanted to include a zip file containing a sample SQL database in a post dealing with surrogate keys and I found there was not an easy way to include the file in my post from within Windows Live Writer.  I quickly was side tracked and never finished that post.  BUT I did write a quick little plugin for WLW. 

The first thing I did is I sat down and wrote down what I wanted to accomplish

  1. Add a file to a post within WLW
  2. Not have to upload the file separately from the post
  3. Not need to edit html to get it to work
  4. Not add any new endpoints or extend the MetablogAPI.

Now I found that I could inset an image and change the html to an anchor tag.  but that broke my 3rd requirement.  I could ftp the file up and enter the URL into an anchor tag but that broke my 2nd requirement.  After thinking about it I determined the issue wasn’t with the MetablogApi, after all I could upload images without any real issue.  The problem was the first requirement.  The MetablogAPI already supported file uploads so it seemed like a matter of changing how windows live writer interacted with the API.

Fortunately,  Windows Live Writer can be extended with Plugins.  So I created a new class library project and set out to take over the world.  Come along Pinky…

If you don’t have WLW it can be a pain to find as Microsoft has long since stopped working on it;  there are open source forks out there for it now but this plugin was written for WLW not the OpenLive Writer and might not work with it.   You can still get the 2009 version of WLW from Microsoft (which should work) or find a 3rd party site/url to download the Windows Essentials 2012.

So I recently replaced my Surface Pro2 with a Surface book which has caused me a great deal of pain in upgrading and transferring everything over.  This post is the last one from my Surface Pro2 and WLW.  I have already posted from my new Surface Book and OLW (Open Live Writer) but it seems to have the same file upload gap as WLW.  So… I will need to update this plugin.  I have attached the code and the compiled dll if you want them, but ZI plan on covering them in more detail in another post for Open Live Writer.

If you have WLW you can get the plugin DLL here

or you can get the whole solution and code here  .  Hmmm it seems the file names don’t come across correctly anymore.  I should fix that while I am at it.