Over the weekend, I met Joe Cheng from the Windows Live Writer team. After asking him about the ease (or potential lack thereof) of plugin authoring, he walked me through a couple of scenarios.
It turns out authoring Live Writer plugins is as easy as using the app itself. Pretty remarkable considering the app is designed to be simple enough that my mom could use it (though I did have trouble locating some simple documentation to compellingly illustrate that fact). No offense, mom.
Joe’s demonstration culminated with showing off his powerful Dynamic Template plugin. He’s even shared the source at CodePlex.
However, not being content to use what’s available (and because it was so ridiculously easy), I decided to write my own plugin:
Element tag around
In the textual discussion of code-type stuff, I’m fond of marking up keywords / class names / local variables / etc. with the html code element. See, I just did it.
I wanted a plugin to simplify adding those elements. I wanted it to be fast to use [keyboard shortcuts]. Also, I know there are all these additional HTML computer code phrase elements, but it’s too inconvenient to remember what they are.
Enter Element tag around:
The most time consuming part of creating the plugin—which took a whopping lunch break—was the layout of the elements on the dialog. Coming from a WPF mindset, dynamically laying out elements in Windows Forms sucks.
As you can see from the screenshot, the available elements are all clearly listed and are insertable via keyboard shortcut (or by simply clicking the associated LinkLabel).
And yes, that was a gratuitous use of my new plugin.
Enjoy.
