Its been a long time that I wanted to use Windows Live Writer, but sign-on was making a mess of everything, including messenger. Now, as I formatted my machine and installed everything fresh, everything seems to be working fine now :).
Here are some of the products from Windows Live that I liked and found them to be useful:
Windows Live Writer
I extremely loved Live Writer...an amazing product from Microsoft. It's simple, yet it's extremely helpful. You can draft your posts offline and still view how it will look like. A whole array of tools for helping make your blogging experience better. While posting online, I always avoided posting photographs as it was a pain. But Writer makes it extremely easy and I was able to do loads of things with it. This post is my first one from Writer :). Other thing I liked was multiple weblog support under same roof. Publishing to different weblogs, including Sharepoint is pretty easy and I am able to manage my technical and personal blog using it. It's just like Microsoft Word!
Writer's architecture looks cool as well. It's a plug-and-play system. SDK is available at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa738906.aspx, which allows you to add new blog host support, add more plug-ins to Writer as well as create your own-custom UI for posting. Nice stuff!
Windows Live Spaces
I left my Spaces blog because of its inconsistent behavior. Visitors complained that they are not able to post comments properly. Its highly improved now and I may switch back to it with a new blog for my new group. It contains module to support HTML insertion just like Blogger, which can be used to add advertisements and news. Pretty cool!
Most interesting thing is its integration with SkyDrive. Few days back, I was discussing with my group that how could we distribute files and I found my answer. Put it on SkyDrive and share it! Features like alerts and sending messages through blogs is what we were looking for. Guestbook is another interesting thing. And there are more cool features available!!
Also, I investigated quite a lot on Web gadgets available as plug-ins. Being a .NET guy, I will certainly code a couple of them as per my requirement :)
But I still find it a bit slow in loading. I would love to see it loading faster. Other aspect that's missing is Comments Moderation feature, which makes Blogger pretty cool. But anyway, Live Spaces is good and with new features that will be integrated with it, will certainly make it more useful.
Windows Live SkyDrive
Online storage and management of files. It's nice but best part is its integration with Live Spaces. Files and folders can be shared and people can access it through shared folders. Pretty useful when used with Spaces.
- Mohit
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