Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Microsoft just released Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging editor tool.

It's beta, so there's a few bugs.

• The first glaring one is that if you have a lot of categories on your blog, the categories dropdown goes forever and continues down past the toolbar.
• Another irritating one is that only GIF and JPG show up in the file types list when adding an image to a post - um, PNG?
• There's also no syntax highlighting or auto-formatting for the HTML view.

All in all, it looks a AWFUL lot like BlogJet, my preferred blog editor, down to the properties tab. The irony is, of course, that all these editors basically use the same DHTML Editing stuff built into IE or some flavor of it, so the actual editing experience will feel much the same.

Here's a list of other VERY good blog editors that I've used personally. I posted about a few last year as well, but John Forsythe has the complete list of ones that work well with DasBlog.

• Zoundry is also a great blog writer that supports DasBlog swimmingly.
• Rocketpost is nice, clean and lightweight and has some nice Photo effects.
• WB Editor has a fresh and clean interface, but a smallish text editing area at low resolutions.

One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD - Really Simple Discovery. Omar added this to the current source tree of DasBlog recently. This will be in DasBlog 1.9, but, as always, you can compile the source yourself and get it now.

RSD worked great during the setup phase with Windows Live Writer as seen in the screenshots below. The writer detected DasBlog's capabilities and API support and configured itself without asking me a single technical question. Nice.

Windows Live Writer also has an SDK for extending the application.

Here's my final thought - why would a Product Group that offers a blogging editor and has their own blog, ask users to go to an MSN Group to offer feedback?  Isn't that kind of not-bloggy?  Remember earlier in your post where it was said blogging was a two-way medium?