Today I've upgraded my blog to the latest version of DasBlog (v2.3).

I took the opportunity to categorize all my blog items and changed to another script for code highlighting. I use now SyntaxHighlighter to format my code and PreCode Snippet for Windows Live Writer.

4 Years ago I created a theme for DasBlog called 'Business'. And it seems to be a very popular theme :). I updated the theme and the following changes has been done

• Style fixes for Firefox and Chrome
• Icon changes
• Added new styles for new features like livepreview, gravatar, etc.

It will soon update the theme in the main distribution of DasBlog on CodePlex.
Suggestions and or comments about the theme are always appreciated!

I am using Windows Live Writer for posting items to my blog. One thing that I don’t like in general, is that applications store resources in the MyDocuments folder and that you cannot specify another location. I’m a huge fan of portable applications, which means that they don’t need any registry settings and/or dependencies, so that you can simply xcopy deploy to another location. Certainly if you are using an external HD, USB flash drive, etc.

Windows Live Writer (WLW) stores by default the drafts in the ‘MyDocuments\My Weblog Posts\Drafts’ folder. I am using the latest beta (v14.0.5025.904) of WLW and didn’t find any settings through the application that enables you to customize folder paths.

I decided to dig into the assemblies of WLW via reflector to see how it is implemented. After some investigation I found that there is a class called ApplicationEnvironment that reside in the WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices assembly. The Initialize method looks like this

Apparently WLW has built-in functionality that enables you to run the application with the settings carried around with the software. WLW checks if there is a folder called ‘UserData’ in the installation folder and uses that folder to store all settings, drafts, etc. This is really great, you simply copy all contents of your WLW directory to for example your external drive and you simply create a folder called ‘UserData’. If you start WLW again it will create all the necessary subfolders and settings.

I think it’s a feature of WLW beta that has not been documented yet

Version 0.28 of SyntaxColor4Writer has been compiled with the latest bits of Windows Live Writer 2008 (12.0.1370.325). You can download it from here.

Version 0.27 of SyntaxColor4Writer has been released. It has been updated with the newest release of Windows Live Writer v12.0.1367.1128 and CodeHighlighter 4.0.0051.

Finally Microsoft has released a final version of Windows Live Writer, namely Windows Live Writer 2008. This means also a new version of SyntaxColor4Writer that has been updated with the latest bit of Windows Live Writer and CodeHighlighter from Actipro, more info here.

A new version of SyntaxColor4Writer has been released, version 0.25. It has been updated with the newest release of Windows Live Writer Beta 3 and CodeHighlighter 4.0.0049 from Actipro.

A new version of SyntaxColor4Writer has been released, version 0.24. It has been updated with the newest release of Windows Live Writer Beta 2 and CodeHighlighter 4.0.0048 from Actipro. There are also some minor changes in the layout of the sidebar.

Please leave a comment to let me know if there are any issues and/or feedback!

Version 0.22 of SyntaxColor4Writer is compiled against the new build release of Windows Live Writer 1.0 (Build 145). The issues around spell checking and FireFox will be fixed in the next release.

I've upgraded SyntaxColor4Writer with the new version of CodeHighlighter 4.0. It uses a new parsing model and it supports some additional language definitions, namely:

• Assembly
• Lua
• MSIL
• Pascal

For example:

1 .method public hidebysig instance bool HasChanges() cil managed
2 {
3       .maxstack 2
4       L_0000: ldarg.0 
5       L_0001: ldc.i4.s 28
6       L_0003: call instance bool System.Data.DataSet::HasChanges(System.Data.DataRowState)
7       L_0008: ret 
8 }

Any suggestions and/or feedback about SyntaxColor4Writer is welcome!

Today I published a new version of SyntaxColor4Writer on IStaySharp.NET. It's compiled against the new beta version of Windows Live Writer with the following added features:

• 'Copy Code' link (copies everything to the clipboard)
• Caption text
• Customize backcolor, including line numbering
• Spaces in tabs
• Font size

Below you find some examples:

1 <system.web>
2    <compilation defaultLanguage="VB" debug="true"/>
3    <customErrors mode="ReadOnly"/>
4 </system.web>

C# code of the Main method class.

 1 /// <summary>
 2 /// The main entry point for the application.
 3 /// </summary>
 4 [STAThread]
 5 static void Main()
 6 {
 7    Application.EnableVisualStyles();
 8    Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
 9    Application.Run(new TestForm());
10 }

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. For Windows Live Writer I created a plugin called SyntaxColor4Writer that enables you to embed syntax highlighting in your blog posts. More details about SyntaxColor4Writer can be found here. This is how the plugin looks:

This is an example of a xml fragment generated by SyntaxColor4Writer:

<system.web>
   <compilation defaultLanguage="VB" debug="true" />
   <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" />
</system.web>