Microsoft has announced back in January the 2009 Release Candidate for Windows Live Writer, but we’ve only just got around to retesting some of the bugs we had with the old release.

We’re really interested with how WLW interacts with the Blog software we deploy in for our client community solutions, namely:

• BlogEngine.NET
• Telligent Community
• WordPress
• Google’s Blogspot

Here’s a quick run-down of the new features and fixes we can now use.

Category and Tag

Prior versions of WLW allowed Category marking. Now Tags can also be added quickly against a post. There’s also a refresh indicator showing new tags being cached from your blog.

Once you’ve built a bunch of blog Tags these are now displayed inside a drop-down Tag cloud alongside your selected target blog.

Future Posting

Some of our clients providing daily news blogs particularly like the Publish fix. They can post final content for publishing upon a future set date and time. Click the drop-down arrow to display the calendar control. Click the required publish date – finally – make sure the Publish check-box is checked for your post to be automatically primed for automatic publishing. We’ve tested this across all our client platforms with success.

Summary

Windows Live Writer’s most impressive features remain its comprehensive image-management allowing simple image-formatting to create impressive design layout.

A good trick is the combining of features to create some interesting variations. For example, applying Instant Photo (similar to Polaroid), applying a copyright, right-margin 10px and throw in a Tilt effect to provide a clever design with quick point and click configuration.

Check out the full list of Windows Live Writer features here. Check out the latest Windows Live Writer Plug-ins here.

Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer