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 .

The template can be downloaded from here. It is a zip file, and it needs to remain as a zip file, it doesn't need extracting at all. Now, you need to find the folder that Visual Studio is checking for your templates. To do this, open up Visual Studio and click on Tools > Options . Now, in Visual Studio, you will automatically have all the options available to you, in Visual Studio Express, you will need to tick "Show all settings" at the bottom. Once done, click on Projects and Solutions and the directory we are after is the second one down. This is where you need to save the zip file to.

When you start Visual Studio, click on new project and you will see in the "My templates" section that you will have the LiveWriterPlugin template available. If you're in the full Visual studio, you will need to click on the Visual C# to see it.

Using this plugin also means you don't need to worry about putting in the GUID into the writer properties, it all gets put in for you. There are some things that you will need to change, like the class name, and the link that appears on the right, but other than that it is your basic plugin . Note: The template does assume that Live Writer is installed on the C: drive on your computer.

Download: http://www.scottisafool.co.uk/LiveWriterPlugin.zip

Any problems with it, please let me know.

SL