Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Working for Microsoft, in fact probably working for any large company, has some odd moments.

As those who read these pages regularly will probably have gathered I’m an enthusiastic follower of technology. I entertain myself inside the company tracking some of the pure research that is underway in our labs, along with following along with many of the product betas and other technologies coming out of our product groups.

On the whole I think I do a pretty good job of maintaining a rounded picture of what is going on in the company, what is coming in terms of technology and the major trends that are driving our industry.

Next week I have a long flight to Washington DC, and anticipating the time on the flight I decided to take a look around for an offline editor that would let me jot down some posts for this site during the dead time, also I needed something that would integrate well with WordPress which I am using to run this site.

Every now and again I find myself reminded of how large Microsoft is and just how much we have under development at any given time, tonight is one such night.

A quick web search pointed me to the download page for “Windows Live Writer”, a product from Microsoft that does exactly what I was looking for.

So, this is my first post from my newly discovered offline blog editor. If you maintain a blog then the application is a free download. It is still in beta but from the limited hour or so that I have had to play so far it appears to be pretty complete.

If you do download it please come back and let me know what you think!