Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Windows Live Writer goes Open Source

My tool of choice for writing posts to this blog has always been Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. Unfortunately it has gotten long in the tooth, and has not seen an update in many a year. Some time back Scott Hanselman announced that Microsoft was planning to make the code for Windows Live Writer available under an open source license. And that has finally come to pass; the code has now been made available under a MIT license, and a fork has been created called Open Live Writer.
 
Unfortunately I could not use it to write this post, because of changes to the Google authentication APIs, but like most open source projects, I expect someone will provide a fix for that in a couple of days.
 
Open Live Writer can be downloaded here.
 
Update (December 23rd, 2015): the Google authentication issue has been fixed and I can now edit this blog with Open Live Writer… which I just did. Gotta love open source.