Saturday, May 3, 2008

Another Live Writer Plugin

I had an idea for another Windows Live Writer Plugin, and since my KickIt! plugin was somewhat working I started a new one that will insert album information from Amazon.  It'll give readers a chance to quickly get to and buy the album or even the non-DRM MP3 version of the tracks.

Here is the album I was listening to while writing this plugin:

The Way of the Fist Image

Five Finger Death Punch

The Way of the Fist

I'll post more information and some of the code when I fix a few issues with the current version.

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Thursday, May 1, 2008

SpreadTheWord Plugin

I decided that the easy way that I was allowing someone to submit one of my posts to dotNetKicks.com wasn't the best way for my blog.  Since I write posts that aren't .NET related, why should there be an easy way to submit them?  I wanted to solve this by writing a Windows Live Writer plugin.

First, I created a Windows Class Library and added a reference to the WindowsLive.Writer.Api.dll found in Live Writer's Program Files directory (which for build 12.0.1370.325 is "C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer"). I also added a post build event to copy my DLL to the plugins directory ("C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins") at the end of a build (NOTE: If Windows Live Writer is open, the build will fail).

I'm not going to give a lot of detail of the way a Live Writer plugin is written (why rehash what Keyvan Nayyeri already wrote at http://nayyeri.net/blog/Write-a-Windows-Live-Writer-plugin-using-C/?).

I also decided to have my plugin use WPF for accepting input.  Since, I haven't figured out how to get the URL & Title for a post, the person blogging has to enter these.  This definitely isn't the ideal solution, but I wanted to get something working.

What I have so far isn't all that great, but it's working well enough for me to put the KickIt! button at the bottom of this post.

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iisreset error

When I started my new job I ran into an issue with running iisreset on Windows XP SP2. If I tried to run iisreset I would get a message saying "class not registered". I was able to get it fixed after searching for a while. This was a few months ago, and today a coworker ran into the same error. It took me a while to find the solution again but this is how we fixed it:

Run each of the following in a command window:
1. regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\atl.dll
2. regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appconf.dll
3. c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\iisrstas /RegServer