P.P.S. You know you can forward this to your friends, right?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Why is this blog post called "Download Windows Live Writer 2012?" Because that's all I wanted to do. I love Live Writer. If you love it too, put a note in the comments and maybe the team will notice, because I will carry Windows Live Writer with me until you pry it from my cold, dead hands. I use Windows Live Writer exclusively for writing my blog posts and I recommend you use it too. Windows Live Writer is the best windows blog authoring application I have found so far.
This post now exists so when I google for download Windows Live Writer I will find it.
I googled with Google for "Windows Live Writer 2012" and got this mess, including the slightly creepy "you visited this page on" message. Um, thanks for noticing.
* These images are poorly resized on purpose you don't think they are clickable.
When I googled with Bing for "Windows Live Writer 2012" I got this mess. Three results from a bunch of evil download sites that I don't trust because they will just install toolbars and I'm generally afraid of them.
The second link looks promising since it's at Microsoft's own Download Center, BUT the date is from 2009.
Finding this thing is too hard so this blog post exists so you can find it and because I felt like complaining a little. Just a little.
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
I noticed yesterday that some C#, JavaScript and CSS files I had sitting in SkyDrive were suddenly editable.
Not just editable, but there's also autocompletion of strings (not quite intellisense, as it's just one file at a time) and token/symbol recognition.
Plus, this editor looked REALLY familiar to me. I started looking.
I looked over at the Windows Azure Portal, where developers can write node.js to make web services directly in the browser. Here we've got dropbox autocomplete, tooltips with syntax errors and even some basic symbolic refactoring!
Below you can see the editor in Azure Mobile Services throwing a tooltip syntax error. Is this happening on the server?
Then I remember TypeScript's "playground" online that shows how TypeScript turns into JavaScript. This is split-screen with TypeScript on the left and JavaScript on the right.
Notice that in TFS Online this editor is used for diffs and comparisons, but also includes inline threaded comments! This is all in JavaScript, people.
I brought up F12 tools just to check.
That's pretty unambiguous. Looking at the CSS by just clicking on editor.main.css. The "vs" in the div's class point to a vs-theme.css that I presume is to set the colors and make the text editor look familiar.
Looking in editor.main.js, it's all minified, but it's cool to see.
This JavaScript code editor/viewer component is on a TFS site, an Azure site and a SkyDrive site, being used very different divisions across Microsoft. Very cool to see code reuse, but also a good experience replicated. Kudos to the SkyDrive team for recognizing a good thing and putting it into production. It'll be interesting to see where else this editor pops up in the future.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
As we continue to pour our few remaining keystrokes into walled gardens we should be asking ourselves - who controls our content? You don't want all your words to be wasted so I hope you own your own domains and have backup copies of all these years of content.
If you die, will everything you've written become a 404? Some people choice to quit the internet, commit infosuicide and make everything return "410 Gone" but most us want our content to live on.
If you die, who will maintain your sites?
If you have kids, you likely have designated a godfather or godmother to raise your kids if you're gone. You should also designate a blogmother and blogfather.
If you have a Google Account (although, oddly and sadly, not a Google Apps account) you can set up the Google Inactive Account Manager to decide what you want done with your account when it's 'inactive' (you're dead). You can have your data sent to a relative, or have the account deleted. It's a great idea.
You can also sign up for a service like Legacy Locker which promises to manage all your digital stuff and handled the hard questions like "is he or she really dead?" and "are you the digital beneficiary?" At $30 a year or $300 one time it seems a little spendy, but it exists and there's clearly a market for the idea.
You should have a "Getaway Thumb Drive." This is your "the house is burning, RUN" drive.
Consider using TrueCrypt or BitLocker To Go to encrypt one and give a copy to two friends or family members (or lawyer). Make a "readme.txt" or a "soiamdead.txt" explaining what you want done with your sites, passwords, etc."
Add your social media sites, blogs, code, repositories and anything else as an asset in your will that is handled by an executor like any other asset.
Even the US Government thinks we need a Social Media Will and I agree. Except for the part where you give your friend an Excel sheet with all your passwords in plaintext. Oh, US Government, you!
They suggest:
Review the privacy policies and the terms and conditions of each website where you have a presence.
State how you would like your profiles to be handled. You may want to completely cancel your profile or keep it up for friends and family to visit. Some sites allow users to create a memorial profile where other users can still see your profile but can’t post anything new.
Give the social media executor a document that lists all the websites where you have a profile, along with your usernames and passwords.
Stipulate in your will that the online executor should have a copy of your death certificate. The online executor may need this as proof in order for websites to take any actions on your behalf.
Check to see if the social media platforms have account management features to let you proactively manage what happens to your accounts after you die.
You should have a plan for your blog, your domains, and anything that has a login. I use a Password Manager and my family has access to that as well.
This may seem morbid or overwhelming, but this is a project that should take you only a few hours. Imagine your family, spouse or partner in the wake of your death and how it will feel for them, wondering how to manage all this digital flotsam you've left. They'll have no idea where to start. It could take them months, or never, to figure it all out. Just take a few hours and write it down.
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Lots of stuff is happening at MSFT right now. Windows 8.1 is around the corner (did you download the 8.1 Preview?) and development is still happening on Visual Studio 2013.
Use whatever colors make you happy. Here's 2013 with the 2010 theme.
Anyway, the ASP.NET and Web Tools team is hard at work on VS 2013 with Web Tools. Remember that the tooling for ASP.NET was pulled out of VS in 2012 and remains an "out of band release." This gives us more flexibility than we had before and will let us get more time to put features in and fix bugs than some groups.
Truth is, the next 4-6 weeks is when we need to be fixing bugs and finding any edge cases or weird stuff. For example, we know that Glimpse doesn't work well with Web Forms and FriendlyUrls. We are actively working on that now.
Download Visual Studio 2013 (and ASP.NET with Web Tools) while your feedback still matters.
What we need from you is bugs and feedback. You can put suff on:
Good Bugs (Bugs with attachments that repro the bug get the most attention) on Connect
Should you install VS2013?
I have it installed on all my four machines and nothing has broken yet.
Since Visual Studio 2013 installs side-by-side with VS2012 and VS2010, if you already have .NET 4.5 and VS2012 it's not that risky to install VS2013. This has a Go-Live license and includes .NET 4.5.1.
RISK: If you have only VS2010 and .NET 4.0, .NET Framework will upgrade your .NET 4.0 to 4.5.1. If you are shipping to a server with .NET 4 you'll likely be OK, but you ARE taking a risk, so don't use a work machine you deeply care about to test on if you also have to ship .NET 4.0 only code.
BENEFIT: That said, anything that breaks under 4.5.1 we DO want to know about. Meaning, if ASP.NET 4.5.1 breaks your ASP.NET 4 app we need to know and we will only find out if you test. But, don't use the only machine you have to work on every day if it's all you have to ship with.
We would REALLY appreciate folks testing ASP.NET 4.0 apps to run them up ASP.NET 4.5.1 and find bugs. It's that scenario that is the most interesting.
Then install the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2013 Refresh- Why a refresh? Because it's newer ASP.NET and Web Tools stuff that we could ship AFTER the Preview.
All this works in the Free Web Express version so you don't need to have a paid copy of Visual Studio to install VS2013.
Useful VS 2013 features
There's lots of new stuff (check the ASP.NET Release notes) but here's just a few highlights:
Edit and Continue for 64 bit applications - In VS2010 and VS2012, the edit and continue option is disabled by default when creating a new web application project. In VS2013 preview, we turned it on by default. You can find this option on the Web tab in the web project’s properties window.
Extensible Scaffolding Framework with new Web Forms Scaffolds and improved MVC scaffolders. You can now enable an ASP.NET app for MVC or Web API and get all the required packages via NuGet. This moves us towards One ASP.NET. There is no "MVC Project Type" or "Web Forms Project Type." There is just one and you can mix and match as you like.
Entity Framework has Async Query and Save support, better POCO support, improved perf, connection resiliency, and Code First mapping to Stored Procedures (and more).
VS tooling enhancements - Editor enhancements, Browser Link. There's an all-new HTML editor that understands HTML5 at the core, lots of stuff there but you'll be most impressed with Browser Link (name will likely change)...it's a bi-directional link between ALL running browsers and Visual Studio, powered by SIgnalR.
New Web API and SignalR functionality - Web API now supports Portable Formatters that can be shared on client and server and you can create clients that work on Windows Phone and Windows Store apps. Web API is also updated to support easier Unit Testing of Controllers. Web API also supports AttributeRouting via an OSS contribution from Tim McCall, and CORS via an OSS contribution from Brock Allen. ASP.NET Web API also supports OWIN and OWIN hosts (it can be hosted outside IIS or in your own Service). SignalR now has iOS and Android support via MonoTouch and MonoDroid in Xamarin tools! SignalR also includes a Portable .NET Client.
We are also (quietly) making other changes moving towards bigger ones, including removing the "Windows-only" Restriction for the ASP.NET Project codenamed "Katana" that will be a big part of the next version of ASP.NET and is a part of the plumbing of this release of ASP.NET as well.
A few of my favorite small Non-ASP.NET specific features are viewing method return values in the debugger (duh!)
and "Peek Definition" which lets you look at a method definition without opening the file.
Also, the return of "RockScroll" in the scrollbar:
Consider also getting the newly open source "Web Essentials" - This is our "unofficial Labs" extension where we try crazy stuff. We hope you dig it and even better we hope you help us make it all better.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
_0a64ca47-8928-4183-b09e-85ede8ee7bb5.png "Azure Mobile Service's rich code editor")
_8f63a156-c2e4-48da-b075-9c02873739dd.png "Inline comments in TFS online")
_c1d116dc-105c-47f3-8d3f-6153041e5334.png "The editor in a side by side diff")
