Today Microsoft opened up the beta for Wave 4 of the Windows Live Essentials tools including Windows Live Writer.  I have been a long time user of WLW and have come to really enjoy both the simplicity and the power of the tool when writing my blog posts.  I really didn’t see a lot that needed “fixing”, and in this release of WLW it looks like that is exactly what I got – not a lot that has been fixed.

That is not to say that a lot hasn’t changed, because from a UI perspective, it is almost completely different.  The biggest change is that the new live writer now proudly sports a fairly standard ribbon bar just like those found in Microsoft Office.  And just like in Office, I find that the new ribbon bar is somewhat of a step backward.  People are by their natures creatures of habits.  Once we learn how to do something, we don’t want to have to relearn it without a very good reason. 

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I have to say how much I appreciate the great job the new DotNetNuke Blog project team is doing.  For a long time, I blogged fairly regularly on DotNetNuke.com.  Ultimately, I decided to start writing my primary blog on my own site and only occasionally reposting to DotNetNuke.com.  When I moved to my own site, I also decided to switch blogging platforms.  I needed something which supported many of the modern blogging features.  For me the killer feature is Windows Live Writer (WLW) support.  Editing a long blog post in the FCK editor is painful.  Anyone who has ever lost a blog post because of a login timeout knows just how painful it truly can be.  I spend an hour or more writing my blog posts and to have it just disappear is enough to make you cry.

Not only have the blog team answered my desire for WLW support, but they have also been slowly but surely addressing many other pain points with the Blog module.  They are quickly bringing the look of the blog up to modern standards and are retrofitting many key features into the blog.  I am almost ready to dump this other blogging platform and move back to the DotNetNuke blog module.

Now I just need to find some time to write some code to support BlogML and I'll be good to go.  Of course, if the blog team beats me to it that would be great.  In the meantime I have to say well-done and a big kudos to you all.