Hot off the press, a new drop of Windows Live Writer was just released.  Get it here.  This is one of my favorite tools from Microsoft and the update brings a few new changes.

First, I’m happy to report that Flickr4Writer and S3Browser still work fine and require no adjustments.  The other thing announced today from the Writer team is an updated SDK.  This new SDK includes a new type of plugin which enable plug-in activity for pre- and post-publish events.  Some of you following me on Twitter may have noticed something every so often that said “blogging: blah blah” and a link to the post.  This is done automatically for me from Writer using a plug-in.  It actually is one of the ones included in the updated SDK (along with another example for adding a Digg badget to your post).

Recently there’s been some discussion of people re-aggregating/posting blog content to other sites.  Even though I had a Creative Commons license on my blog’s footer, etc, it wasn’t in my content so when someone re-posted my stuff automatically, it wasn’t visible.  Using the new Writer SDK, I created a quick little plug-in that would add a notation about the Creative Commons license I was using to every post.  Again, automatically now and I don’t have to write anything.  I’m making this one available for free/test and you can get it here.  These plug-ins are accessed in the same way through the Tools…Options menu in Writer.  Here’s the configuration for mine:

If you click the Preview tab (a new feature in Writer preview – tabs instead of menu options to switch between Edit, Preview, Source), it will show you what it will look like as well.  These types of plugins can also be enabled per weblog so if you have more than one weblog defined for Writer, you can choose which one you want these post- and pre-publish event plug-ins to be turned on for. 

For some existing plugins out there, this is a more natural fit.  When I heard about this new model, I joined up with Alexander Groß who wrote the Now Playing plug-in which is awesome and flexible (he’s also involved in a great Graffiti template for user groups).  But it seemed a more natural fit to use this model of automatically appending the information instead of having the user remember to click the button to insert the information.  I’ve submitted my changes to Alexander and hope they make it into his next build of Now Playing.  It looks the same in config and here it is in preview mode in Writer:

I love the new Writer with the subtle changes it has made and the additional plug-in model.  Get your update today!

This week I’ll be traveling to Mexico City to meet developers and designers at the local MIX Essentials (English translation here – funny that RIA gets translated to LAUGHS) event.  I’ll be presenting two sessions there this week.  I was fortunate enough to be asked to kick-off the conference talking about building RIAs with Silverlight 2.  I’m particularly excited about this as I have some things to show that haven’t really been shown broadly yet.  I will also be speaking on working with data in Silverlight 2 later in the day.  This session will cover working with services, servers, sockets and LINQ as a part of Silverlight development.

I hope that all those near Mexico City and around will be able to join us at this event.  If you are planning on being there, I look forward to meeting you and getting feedback on Silverlight as well as seeing what really interesting things are being developed in Mexico.  See you soon!

I searched and didn’t immediately find anything, so I’m partly doing this for my own mental archive but also for others who might want this feature.

First, I use two tools for snapshot capturing.  When I want a quick snapshot with no annotation, I use WinSnap, which rocks the hizzouse.  For when I need annotation (arrows, highlighting, etc.) I use SnagIt from the makers of Camtasia (Betsy Weber rocks).  Both of these tools are incredible and I’ve purchases full licenses for both and haven’t regretted it at all.

In WinSnap, there is a feature that allows you to specify a tool you can run on the image that was just captured.  I’ve customized this using PNGOut based on recommendations and feedback.  Most programs create PNG files that can still be compressed by stripping out interlacing or whatever.  You can read all about image formats from Coding Horror here.  Jeff’s tips on bandwidth savings for web sites are invaluable.  It is helpful and works well in WinSnap.  One thing I can’t figure out is that WinSnap never saves my custom commands…that is quite frustrating, but I get over it…I don’t reboot often so I deal with it.

When using SnagIt though I didn’t use PNGOut.  Partly because I didn’t think it had that capability…alas but it does!  here’s how I customized it.  First, get PNGOut and put it somewhere.  For consistency with other programs I put mine in C:\Program Files\PNGOut\pngout.exe.  Yes I know there are GUIs for the tool, but I like the command-line as it integrates with this workflow.  Okay, now in SnagIt set up a new capture profile using the Add Profile wizard (I couldn’t figure out how to use SnagIt to take a capture of the SnagIt box :-) or I’d show it here).

Decide your settings for steps 1 and 2.  When you get to 3, do this:

• Click the Properties button
• Click the Program tab
• Click Add and then point to where you have PNGOut.exe and save that setting
• Under the File name area, I don’t like automatic naming so I change that to ask me for a file name
• Click OK
• Make sure that in the Step 3 wizard that Program is now selected (and if not select it)
• Choose your other settings and then finish the wizard

Boom, now when you capture a screenshot with this newly created profile you can annotate or do whatever you want with the capture in SnagIt and then when you click finish (after giving the file a name), PNGOut will automatically run:

This will save the image immediately, run PNGOut on it and keep it in the same place…saving you time, size and bandwidth (assuming you are uploading the image to a browser).  This works nicely with my workflow.  I think I’m going to hack together another output program that enables an immediate upload to Amazon S3 so that I can capture, annotate, compress and upload in one click (well, 2).

Anyhow, hope this helps!

I just finished up a day attending the Chicago RIApalooza event in, well, Chicago.  First, I must say that I love cities with great mass transit systems.  I’ve said this before and I keep threatening myself to move to one.

For this event I paired up with a super designer Corrina Barber.  Corrina works as a user experience designer at Microsoft, is wicked smart and was a perfect compliment to this event.  Most of the attendees at RIApalooza I believed to be interactive developers, so most having a knack for design.  I figured rather than a developer only session it would be better to have more of a design skew on what Silverlight, Visual Studio and Blend bring to the table for developers and designers.  Corrina and I set off to demonstrate that designer/developer workflow that Microsoft talks about so much.  To set the stage, basically we started with a concept and then Corrina used Expression Blend to create a wire-frame mock-up using unstyled controls.  I then jumped in as the developer and modified only code, keeping the design in tact while my designer counterpart continued on fit-n-finish and polishing the design.  It is really great to see this separation and see how a developer can work on a project, keep the design integrity 100% and allow this separation.  In the end we had a final product that demonstrated this concept as well as some aspects with Silverlight such as IsolatedStorage, WebClient, LINQ to XML, data binding, etc.  I hope it was well received.  Corrina held court in the lounge afterwards gathering feedback from designers on what we (MSFT) are doing right with our tools/platform and what could be improved.  I listened in a few times and it was great feedback and I think the attendees really appreciated hearing stuff straight from a designer!

The rest of the day’s sessions were great.  Back up.  The night before was a social mixer where we had a discussion from Dave Meeker of Roundarch.  This guy gets it.  It really was spot-on in my opinion and I sincerely appreciated his perspectives and knowledge brought to the discussion that evening.  We ended with a panel discussion that surprisingly had more to do with discussions around business/marketing aspects than any technology.  It was a good discussion.

Okay, the rest of the day was great.  Presentations from Corey Miller and Anthony Hendley on Silverlight, WPF and XAML.  A look at RIA best practices with Josh Holmes and Michael Labriola.  Some cool framework stuff looking to merge the world of .NET and Flex from Ka Wai Cheung of We Are Mammoth (which ironically describes themselves as a small firm).

I also personally had some great conversations, particularly with Stanton Ware, Donald Burnett and Michael Labriola.  Nearing the end of the day I caught Michael in a resting moment and decided not to let him rest.  What started with a simple question of “do you think you can show me Flex for a few minutes” led to an hour or so demonstration of Flex Builder, the platform and some concepts in software design of Flex applications.  Honestly it was time very well spent and I have a much better perspective of Flex, what is good, what is bad, etc.  We also philosophized (bushism term, deal with it) about evangelism, organizational growth, etc.  Good conversation.  He’s a really smart dude.

I also was able to sit down with Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost with The Thirsty Developer.  I had a good time on the podcast and hope it turns out okay for the guys.  Thanks to them for asking me to participate!  The Thirsty Developer is one podcast that I’m subscribed to and I think they have a good balance of fun and conversation with the people they choose to talk with.  I would recommend you take a look and consider subscribing.

 

I was real pleased with RIApalooza and hope to see more of them sprout up.  The mashup of community and discussion was welcome and refreshing.  Congratulations to the entire planning committee on a job well done.

Take a few minutes and look at this video of Jose Fajardo re-demonstrating one of his ReMIX features shown using Silverlight and DeepZoom.  Are you kidding me?!  Seriously, Jose has a great imagination and an incredible sense for effectively demonstrating things.

In this video he answers questions posed to himself like “what if all web images were DeepZoom-able?” and “what if all the documents on the web were DeepZoom-able?”  Then he gets crazy and suggests that people could collaborate with a DeepZoom image and demonstrates this using a Silverlight chat experience built using network sockets.  I love his context of showing an x-ray and possibly having physicians review this together.

Bravo Jose on another well executed set of experiences.  I hope these surface online for use as the Hard Rock memorabilia site has stiff competition even in these samples!