Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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It's no secret that Windows Live Writer is simply the best blog authoring tool out there. What I love is how innovative that team is. Rather than being held hostage to the many blog APIs out there, they have defined awesome ways to provide extensibility and self description of blogging capabilities. From their support of RSD to the latest set of APIs, they keep pushing the envelope by keeping the product fresh and relevant to bloggers. Witness the fact that WordPress and Typepad both have support for this, as well as open source blogs like Subtext and dasBlog.
The best example of this is their recent API support that allows blogging engines like dasBlog to be much better integrated. Scott wrote about this on his blog, and I just updated my blog to take advantage of this. For any existing dasBlog users this is just a drop in upgrade.
Having said that there is one very important bug fix to the blog APIs in dasBlog to support the synchronization of posts to Live Writer. This will be in the upcoming 1.9 release.
BTW, my fav feature of WLW beta 2.... red squiglies. If your app ain't got background spell checking, then it's pretty useless to me. Why? Jeff Atwood says is best:
"People absolutely adore background spell checking. It's one of those rare "you'll get it from me when you pry it out of my dead, cold hands" features that users will switch applications over. Automatic background red-squiggly-underline spell checking in HTML forms is one of the marquee features of Firefox 2.0. In fact, it's feature number two on the feature page, right under tabbed browsing."