Like many other bloggers out there on the interweb I have been using Windows Live Writer for many years. If you are also a Windows Live Writer user, then you also likely know that the product has not been updated for several years (the latest version is from 2012). Although the current version works it has grown stagnate in its feature set. That’s why I am excited to find out that Microsoft has open sourced Windows Live Write as Open Live Writer as of December 9th, 2015! You can find the official announcement 
here on the .NET Foundation web site.
From here on out, Open Live Writer will be maintained and expanded by the open source community. What this means is that if there is a feature you’d like to help build into Open Live Writer, you can! However, it’s not just developers they are looking to get help from. They are also looking for anyone interested in the following:
- Writing code
- Testing early builds
- Authoring or editing documentation
- Feature definition / product management
- Marketing and public relations
- Digital media
- Community building
- User support
The current release of Open Live Writer is v0.5. You can get a general idea of the release roadmap here. One of my personal desires for Live Writer – markdown support – appears to be covered in the v1.1 release so that’s pretty exciting!
One other feature I’d like to see in Live Writer is the ability for Automatic Linking and Accounts to sync across devices. This becomes relatively simple if Live Writer were to ever become a Universal Windows (Platform) app. But, for now, I’m just happy to see it finally getting some love.
That said, there are a few missing features (and other issues) with the current release of Open Live Writer:
- Spell checking was removed because the spell checking component was old and didn’t have a license that supported open sourcing of the code. Hopefully I’ve not made too many typos in this post!
- The Blog This API was removed.
- The “Albums” feature was also removed. Personally, I never even realized this was a feature until I read it had been removed ;-)
You can read about the rest of the issues on Scott Hanselman’s post (see link below).
To find out more, check out these links:
- Open Live Writer Roadmap
- Open Live Writer GitHub repo – view and pull down source code
- Open Live Writer Announcement on .NET Foundation
- Open Live Writer Announcement on Scott Hanselman’s blog
- Open Live Writer website
P.S. As one would expect, this blog post was posted using Open Live Writer :-)