After fixing up my CommunityServer install (ASP.NET 2.0 is the way to go it seems) I thought I'd give WLW another go. And it's really fun.

It supports WYSIWYG post editing, and off-line composing (so if you're offline you can store your posts as drafts, and publish them later) and (my personal favourite) a spell checker!

It includes a great image editor - you can import images and style them (either using the built-in capabilities, or importing styles from your own blog CSS - it reads a sample post to work out what it needs to support) and tries various ways to upload the image along with the post (there are a number of APIs that it case use... and in the worst case simple FTP). One thing I'd love to see is the ability to use it to upload an image to Flickr or Zooomr and insert a thumbnail in the post that links to the larger image...

If you publish a post and realise you've made a mistake... it's a simple thing to grab it, edit it and re-publish it (and no-one is the wiser!)

They've also added the ability to add third party plugins... such as the "Currently listening to" one I'm using, or Flickr image imports, or source code formatting.... so it'll be interesting to see how it gets extended and evolved. In many ways I think it's similar to Flock (the Firefox based "community browser") so they may well evolve in similar directions...

I think WLW will become my de facto choice for PC based editing, and Diarist - Windows Mobile blogging tool for when I'm out and about without my PC. It'll be a rare day that I actually use the blogging software interface to blog!

Only niggle I've found with it at the moment... it's not very good at getting style info from Community Server, and won't let me tell it what stylesheet to use, so I do still have to resort to the HTML view every now and then to tidy things up! The other little niggle is that you can't add new categories when posting (though that might be a CommunityServer limit, I don't rightly know) and it doesn't (seem to) refresh the list when you grab a post from the server to edit it

[Currently listening to: State of Bengal - Flight IC408]