Love Windows Live Writer? Wish it did more? Then write a plugin… and here’s some tips for doing just that… (with even some VB in there for flavor :)

InsertableContentSource - Top Tips For Live Writer Plug-in Developers

“Whether you’ve written Live Writer plug-ins before, or if you’re just thinking about writing your first, hopefully this post will give you some good tips that will help you build that new plug-in.

Use A Visual Studio Template

I would highly recommend downloading a Visual Studio template. The template can be downloaded for machines running x86 or x64 flavours of Windows (for VB.NET devs, downloads are x86 and x64). The reason I have done ones for both architectures is because otherwise you have to remove and then re-add the reference to WindowsLive.Writer.Api.dll as it will be looking in the wrong Program Files folder. The template itself is based on a combination of templates written by myself and Ben Hall. …

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Make Sure The Plug-in Copies Automatically To The Plugin Folder

If you’re using the template from above, then you can skip this tip. …

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Run Live Writer When Debugging Plug-ins

Because Live Writer plug-ins are just dlls, it makes it somewhat more difficult to actually debug them, however, with just a simple change to the project’s properties (again), we can make this oh so easy. …

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Add Plug-in Options to the QAT (Wave 4 and newer)

With the latest beta of Live Writer, we have been given the Ribbon UI that has been present in Office for a few years now. …

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Scott provides a number of handy, don’t re-invent the wheel, time saving tips for your Windows Live Writer development. These are things you’ll likely figure out on your own after time, but why waste that time figuring this out when it could be better spent working on your uber plugin! ;)

And a huge thanks to Scott for taking the time to provide VB templates too. (This is his first time doing VB… Welcome to the Dark Side Scott! lol)

 

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