Beck's Microsoft Blog

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The very first beta release of Writer was in August 2006.  Since then we've had 2 more beta releases and over 1.5 million people, all over the world, installing the product and send feedback our way.

This has been a really fun product to develop and I look forward to planning out the next version with even more cool and exciting publishing features!

Today, the Windows Live Writer team released Beta 3.

While Beta 2 was more about adding functionality to Writer and putting in "juicy" features, Beta 3 is more about rounding out the quality of the product.  Joe (one of our developers) does a really good job describing our Beta 3 work in more detail.

This is the last of our beta releases before shipping the "final" 1.0 (or 2.0) version, so now is the time to tell us what you think.

This is even better than adding a printer on Vista - not!

This is screen shot of IE running full screen on my desktop. 
What?  Can't you tell? :)

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 is now available for download.  You can get all the details on our team blog.

This was a long release cycle for our team where we took the opportunity to invest in foundational pieces that make blogging easy and accessible for even more people.  This includes work we did to make Writer available in 6 languages:

1. English
2. German
3. French
4. Japanese
5. Chinese
6. Spanish

This also includes accessibility support for keyboards and screen readers.

We also got a lot of feedback on our newsgroups, and by reading your blogs, and think you'll find that much of that has been addressed with features like: table authoring, in-line spell checking and better plug-in integration.

What's next for Writer?

There IS a next release of Writer - that I can say for sure. 
We're already plowing ahead on that and will be listening to the feedback we get from this release.  We'd love to hear about your experience: good or bad.  Here are the different ways you can share your thoughts:

Customer Forums - this is our discussion form where you can talk with other Writer customers and the Writer team
Feedback - praise or punish us; this is anonymous and we can't reply to you
Support - if you have a technical issue you can email our support center for help
Developers - a whole community site with links to dev documentation and a discussion forum for developers

On a personal note, I thought the first release of Writer was exciting and I'm even more excited this time.
I'll be watching the feedback closely.

Now on to the next release...

Today, when you visit http://get.live.com/betas/ Windows Live Writer is the featured application (which means we get more space at the top):

Now you can also directly navigate to the Writer product page directly at: http://writer.live.com/.  It features links to the Writer Team Blog and the Writer feedback forum.

This is a great improvement for the Writer team because we have not had a good product page to reference since the first release in August 2006.  As a result, most people have linked their blog posts either to the Writer Team Blog or directly the Writer MSI.  This has bumped the Writer MSI to the top of the search results generated for "Windows Live Writer" and "Live Writer", which could be a unexpected or jarring experience for those searching the Internet for Writer and the first link they click on starts installing the application.  Now that it is possible to directly reference http://writer.live.com/ the hope is that that becomes the URL of choice when linking to Writer on the web.