The general consensus about Microsoft's Windows Live offerings is that Windows Live Writer (WLW) is one of the better, if not the best, products they are planning to bring out. Beta 1 was released about 9 months ago and this week beta 2 finally hit the shelves. I don't need to talk too much about the product itself (plenty of other people have done that) but I did have some problems upon install that are worth sharing.
When I originally tried to install the installer was visible for a few seconds and then quite literally vanished without warning. Nothing in Task Manager. Zip. I was completely nonplussed so I headed to the WLW forum and found that I wasn't the only one having the problem. Joe Cheng, who does a mercurial job of supporting the WLW user base, picked up on it and together we managed to figure out the problem. Allow me to summarise.
On the same day that WLW Beta 2 was announced so were betas for Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and Windows Live Mail. These three products have been unified under a single installer base and there is a bug in that installer that means it will only install products that have the same language. I had already installed Messenger and Mail and it turns out that the installers I downloaded for those had a language of "English (United Kingdom)" and my Writer installer was "English (United States)".
Hence, the install didn't work. Downloading the "English (United Kingdom)" version solved the problem and hence I am now writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer beta 2.
We aren't given a choice about which version to download so on this one I can't really blame myself (thankfully) so the question arises about why Microsoft gave me different language versions when I downloaded. Perhaps because all the information that Microsoft has about me says I am in the UK although in actual fact I am currently living in the US for a year or so. Anyway - that's their problem to sort out.
The other obvious problem is the bug in the installer. Joe says they are aware of it and are working on fixing it.
I can't be too critical about all of this, it IS beta software and the point about beta software is that it might not work properly. If the same problems exist in RTM then I'll have cause for complaint.
Thanks to Joe for all his help in sorting this out.
-Jamie
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