We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Writer Beta is available for download today. 

 
Windows Live Writer Beta (14.0.5025.904)

Here’s what you can expect to find in this beta:

Image and video publishing enhancements

• Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
• Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Blog authoring enhancements

• Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

Experience improvements

For those of you who downloaded the Technical Preview and have used Writer in the last couple of days, you may have seen a notification to upgrade to the new version only to be directed to http://get.live.com/writer to find that there is nothing new to install.

On Monday (September 1, 2008) the Technical Preview of Writer started erroneously triggering expiration for October 1, 2008.  We have fixed the issue that was causing the false expiration.  While the Technical Preview of Writer will not expire on October 1, you may still see this notification again. 

When you see this notification, click the “Ask Me Later” button and you will be able to continue using Writer without any change.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

The Windows Live Writer Team

Members of the Writer team will be at BlogHer ‘08 in San Francisco this Friday through Sunday. 

In addition to roaming around the sessions, we’ll be presenting and leading round-table discussion about Writer at the Microsoft-hosted breakfast series on Saturday from 8:15 – 9:15 AM.  We’re told that in addition to breakfast (of course) attendees will receive SWAG bags that include a bunch of fun stuff such as: Mini Cams, copies of Windows Live One Care (one yr. free subscription) and a few copies of Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, Windows Live and some other stuff.

Feel free to pull us aside or stop by the breakfast series on Saturday and say “hi”. We’re looking forward to meeting and talking with as many of you as we can.

Catherine Heller (Channel 9) interviews Charles Teague (our Dev Lead) on Windows Live Writer.
 
Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

Catherine Heller (Channel 9) interviews Charles Teague (our Dev Lead) on Windows Live Writer.
 
Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio.
Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

You can now install the latest technical preview of Windows Live Writer.

What you’ll find in this release:

SDK Updates

This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events. These updates are still experimental and these APIs are not stable--we may make changes based on your feedback that break plug-ins that use these new methods. However, we’re really excited about the new set of scenarios have been unlocked and look forward to hearing feedback from all of you Writer plug-in developers out there.

For more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

New Features

You’ll also get an early look at some improvements and new features we’ve been working on:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements

• Upload videos to Soapbox
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Editing Enhancements

• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

UI Improvements

• Revised main toolbar
• Tabs for view switching
• Improved category control with search/filtering

Send Feedback

We look forward to hearing your feedback about this release. The following resources are available to you for providing feedback to the Writer team:

• For feedback about the Technical Preview, please use our Windows Live Writer (Beta) Forum.
• For feedback about the SDK, please use our Windows Live Writer Developer Forums.

We hope you enjoy the Technical Preview!

The Windows Live Writer Team

Instructional video demonstrations for how to use Windows Live Writer are now available.  Check them out on Soapbox and YouTube!

1 – Getting Started

2 minutes, 26 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to setup Windows Live Writer to work with your blog and, if you don't already have a blog, how to create a new blog on Windows Live.

2 - Basic Authoring

2 minutes, 16 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to do basic authoring of a blog post using Windows Live Writer.

3 - Pictures, Videos, Maps and Plug-ins (oh my!)

5 minutes
This instructional video demonstration shows how to insert and edit rich content - like pictures, videos and maps - using Windows Live Writer.

4 – Open, Save, Publish and Help

2 minutes, 44 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to open, save, print and publish blog posts using Windows Live Writer. You will also learn about how to get more information and send feedback to the Windows Live Writer team.

5 - Windows Live Writer

11 minutes
This is a single video that covers the all the same content in the videos listed above (1 - 4).

Enjoy!

For those of you who frequently include images in your blog posts and find that you often apply the same settings, there is a convenient feature in Writer that enables you to save those settings as the defaults for all future images. 

How it works

• First, inset an image. 
• Then apply the settings to the image so it look the way you want (for example: change the text wrapping to "Right" and apply the "Photopaper" border).
• Then click on the "Save settings as default" link at the bottom of the Image Properties sidebar (as shown on the right).

Now, the next time you insert an image it will be using the settings that you just saved following the steps above.

Settings that get saved

Not all settings get saved when you use this feature.  Settings that will be saved are:

• Text wrapping
• Margins
• Borders
• Link to
• Image size
• Watermark effect

Defaults per blog account

The defaults are saved uniquely for each blog account.  That means if you have Writer configured to multiple blog accounts you can specify settings for images that are unique to each account. 

Revert to default settings

And for those of you who tend to get a little crazy formatting your images and take it a little to far, it's easy to wipe the slate clean and start over by clicking "Revert to default settings" at the bottom on the Image Properties sidebar.  This will remove any changes that you've applied to the image and set it back to whatever the images defaults are for that account.

Get back to the defaults that came with Writer

If you changed the image setting defaults for your account and want to change them back to the defaults used by Writer do the following:

• Set "Text wrapping" to "Left"
• Set "Margins" to "No Margins"
• Set "Borders" to "Drop Shadow"
• Set "Link to" to "Source"
• Set "Image size" to "Small"
• Remove any watermark effects
• Click "Save settings as default"

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

Today, the Writer team learned of changes to Blogger that cause Writer to fail when publishing posts that contain images.  When attempting to publish a post that contains images, Writer will show the following message:

We're currently investigating a fix for this issue and will post an update as soon as we have more information.

Thanks to everyone who reported this issue.