Thursday, December 10, 2015

Windows Live Writer Is Open Source Now!

For a long time I use Windows Live Writer 2012 (WLW) as my blogging tool. And as far as I know, many other people use it as well. Simply because it works like a charm. With this tool it’s super easy to write postings for my blog. It’s really a totally awesome WYSIWYG editor.

However, much of the code base is ten years old and something's required attention. Like lacking support of OAuth 2. But there wasn’t any effort to update WLW 2012. Gladly a Microsoft employee (Scott Hanselman) decided to give WLW a new whole new life.

Not as a Microsoft product but as an open source product. Scott got support from many people in order to address many challenges, not only a technological level but also on a legal level since WLW is a 100% Microsoft product.

As time passed, it got more traction and from yesterday on the first version (0.5!) became available for the public to test/use it. This open source product is a fork of WLW and goes by the name Open Live Writer (OLW).

Thanks to Scott Hanselman, Microsoft and many other people OLW is alive and kicking! Many new features will be added soon, like OAuth 2 for instance.

Want to know more? go here for Scott’s posting about OWL and here for the OLW website.

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