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In my previous post, I mentioned that the Live Writer SDK had been updated as well as Live Writer itself. In this post I will show you how to build a couple of quick plugins that use the new APIs, but first, what’s changed?

The big thing to note is that all the API calls in the previous version of the SDK are unchanged; the changes have been additions to the SDK. So the main two new additions are two new plugin classes: PublishNotificationHook and HeaderFooterSource. This gives us four types of plugins: ContentSource, SmartContentSource, PublishNotificationHook and HeaderFooterSource. There are also a couple of other new smaller additions, like the TaskServices class that will let you perform a task in the background whilst still keeping the Writer UI in a responsive state.

But this post is going to concentrate on those two new Plugin base classes, which you can see after the jump.

This is essentially a supplement to Scotts articles on how to write a Windows Live Writer plugin. In this article I'll show you how to implement a simple Amazon Web Service lookup and take that information to create a simple layout for a book review blog post.

Live Writer plugins basically fall into a number of categories but the one in this simple example to get you all started is probably the easiest one to start coding with and is based on the CreateContent API. Windows Live Plugins work in essentially the same way for each type of plugin that you create. You have a main cs (or vb) class file that instantiates any windows forms that you want to use, gather the information then plonk that information into Windows Live Writer. The basic example we'll start coding is a book review template. To make things slightly easier, we use Amazon web services to look certain information about the book and also to get a picture of the front cover of the book.

As you all may remember, I wrote a guide on creating your own basic plug-in for Windows Live Writer, well I have now created a template that you can use within Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express so when you create a new project it will put the base code and add in all the references for you, so all you need to do is get cracking and program .