OpenLiveWriter Version Of Syntax Highlighter Plugin Available Now
In case you hadn’t heard the excellent Windows Live Writer has gone Open Source and is being kept alive by the community. It’s now called OpenLiveWriter. This is great news as it is a really useful tool, used by many, that was looking like being left to die by Microsoft. For more information check out these links:
Scott Hanselman’s post:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingOpenLiveWriterAnOpenSourceForkOfWindowsLiveWriter.aspx
The .Net Foundations post:
http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/blog/open-live-writer
The official OpenLiveWriter blog is here:
http://openlivewriter.org/
These are very early days for OpenLiveWriter and it looks like it will go through some changes as it evolves, including the way that it handles plugins. Despite the expectation that a lot will break through this evolution I have worked on updating my Syntax Hightlighting plugin for Wordpress.com to work with OpenLiveWriter.
Updating the plugin to work with OpenLiveWriter was fairly straight forward thanks to the OpenLiveWriter SDK NuGet Package which can be found here: https://www.nuget.org/packages/OpenLiveWriter.SDK. The plugin project also needed to be updated from .Net 2.0 to .Net 4.5.2.
Installation Steps
The updated plugin can be downloaded here and is V2.0 onwards:
Be aware that the location of plugins and the way that they are handled and located is going to change and this may impact your plugin when you update OLW. You have 2 options.
Option 1: By default OLW will look in the Plugins folder inside the application path (e.g: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\OpenLiveWriter\app-0.5.1.3\Plugins) but this path will change as OLW auto-updates itself (i.e. the app number will change). To install copy the plugin (and its supporting txt file in the downloaded Zip package) to that path using the latest …\app-x.x.x.x folder present on your system. Each time OLW updates to a new version you will need to re-copy or move the plugin into the new …\app-x.x.x.x folder.
Option 2: OLW (like WLW before it) checks the registry for plugins too and so you can add a registry key telling OLW where to find the plugin. Whilst this feature is supported by OLW this should enable the plugin to survive OLW auto updates without you having to do anything. Just download and extract the plugin to a folder on your harddrive and then add a new registry key to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\OpenLiveWriter\PluginAssemblies with the name (can be anything) and the location where you placed the plugin. For example:
This new version of my plugin is just a port of the old version for Windows Live Writer (V.1.4.2) with no new features and is an initial BETA version for the new OpenLiveWriter, but I hope to ensure that it remains current with the ongoing evolution of OLW.
Thanks to Scott Lovegrove for helpful tips and to Mike Kaufmann for inspiring me to do the update.