There’s a new version of WL Writer, so I spent a little time updating my Gamer Card Writer Plugin. The big addition in this version is support for the different card styles from MyGamerCard.net. Also, I added a preview, so you can see what the card will look like before you insert it into your post.
Rather than post it here, I submitted it to the Windows Live Gallery, since they’ve added an area for Writer Plugins. You can download it from there.
In my last post, I wanted to include a link to my gamer card, showing the NHL 07 logo on it. It turns out that in addition to the “official” gamer card from Xbox.com, there’s also the MyGamerCard.net site which provides both image and flash versions of gamer cards. Since I’m using Windows Live Writer, and I hear it’s really easy to extend, I decided to throw together a plugin for inserting Gamer Cards. It was, as advertised, extremely easy. I spent more time laying out the dialog box than I did writing the code to interface with WL Writer.
The plug in provides basically five Gamer Card options:
I’m interested in feedback and suggestions for future versions. MyGamerCard.net provides ten different Gamer Card styles (that’s my Gamer Card to the left) so that’s an obvious enhancement for another day. I’d also like to evolve the plugin into a “Smart Content Source”, which allows you to edit the content after it’s been created (like the default “Insert Map” option). Finally, I’m thinking of adding support for GamerScoreChart.com.
Download GamerCard.WriterPlugin.Setup.zip (142.41 KB) and enjoy. Let me know what you think.
So I downloaded the SDK for WL Writer and took a quick look. Basically, there’s two types of extensions you can build:
Given that they are trying to support “every blogging service out there”, I’m surprised there’s not a way to build a plugable blogging service. WL Writer only allows you to customize the content of the post via plugins. Customizing the metadata (i.e. categories) is right out. I realize it’s the hip thing to put Technorati tags right in your post content, but Technorati also picks up category information which dasBlog already has great support for. What I’d really like is something that acts like del.icio.us’ new post form, where you can free type in your categories, it highlights words as you type and it shows you a list of all your tags so you can click on them.
One other minor note – WL Writer does a good job for inserting hyperlinks. When you select a word, often the whitespace that follows it is also selected. Some HTML editors will insert the hyperlink over the whole selection – inlcuding the whitespace which makes no sense. WL Writer gets it right and excludes any trailing whitespace from the hyperlink. Cool!
I did say I was going to go a little dark when I took the new job didn’t I? Things have been hectic – my brother’s getting married in just under two weeks and I’m working on getting my part of my new project’s Business Requirements Document (otherwise known as the BRD) done before I leave on vacation. The BRD process is fairly odd for this project – for one, the project team is writing it instead of the business unit. Given that we’re building infrastructure, many of the “business” elements of the BRD are not particularly appropriate. But we’re muddling thru. In a meeting with my boss’s boss’s boss last week, he stressed the need for delivering incremental value. In other words, the need for using an agile process which is cool as far as I’m concerned.
I have a couple of longer posts coming, but here are a few short takes for a Monday morning:
Everyone seems gaga over the new tool, so I downloaded it. Pretty cool.
I’m writing this post using it. Typically, I write my posts in
FrontPageSharePoint
Designer
and paste them into the dasBlog web editing interface – I’m pretty
particular about the HTML that ends up on my blog. So far, Writer seems
up for the job. And I love the Web Layout editing mode. Does have some
bugs and missing features. For example, it has spell check, but not
background spell check. And as Scott pointed
out
the category list is totally broken when you have a lot of categories.
Writer has an
SDK,
and one of the examples they suggest building with it is “Tags from
tagging services”. I’d like to have a simple text box where I could
enter categories as tags, and have it automatically create any
categories that aren’t already on my site. I’ve already got a side
coding project going, but I’m almost done so maybe I’ll take that up
next.
I was researching some Xbox stuff for a customer several months ago and got wind of this plan. I can’t wait to see it running. I recently picked up Frank Luna’sIntro to 3d Game Programming: A Shader Approach based on Dave’s recommendation. I figure most, if not all, the source code will be obsolete in the XNA Framework world, but the concepts are spot on so it’s been a good read.
One aspect of this announcement that I haven’t seen talked about yet is the impact on the mod community. Many games today ship with an SDK – here are examples for Dungeon Siege, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. Of course, the idea is that modder’s get a popular game and industrial-strength game engine to build on for almost no cost and the game publisher expands the value of their game – any mods require the original game to play. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could mod Halo 3? And combined with Live Anywhere, the possibilities are enormous. I can’t wait to see how this evolves.
New Machine & Vista
For the first time in my nearly 8 year MSFT career, I have a desktop machine. And it’s a nice one – a Dell Precision 690 workstation. 2x dual Xenon CPU, 2x 160GB SCSI Hard Drives, dual link DVI outputs for driving twin widescreen monitors – dual is very big on this machine. Pretty much the only skimpy part of this machine is the RAM – only 2GB. But I’m not running x64 (yet) so that’s not a huge deal (yet).
Of course, such a screaming machine runs the latest Vista build. I’m also running it on my laptop – with Aero Glass even, thanks to this driver. The combo of latest Vista build + latest Office build is pretty sweet.
With new machines and new operating systems, I’ve been spending significant time installing. The Dell box turned out to be a real pain as it only has the SCSI drives which are not standard on the WinXP install disk. I’m dual booting XP/Vista on both machines, but I had to create a custom slipstreamed XP install disk to get my Dell workstation up and running (Vista installed without any extra work). But now I’ve got the baseline install imaged – thanks to BootIt NG which I’ve spoken highly of before – I shouldn’t ever have to do that again.
I’m settling in to my new job. One way to tell, read Dale Churchward’s blog. Dale’s a teammate of mine. He only joined Microsoft a few months ago. Apparently, he used to blog at his old job, but either way we’ve now doubled the number of bloggers on my new team, with hopefully more to follow.
In addition to his opinions of political discource and the Seahawks chances next season, Dale’s got some interesting posts on data integration and system diagrams. Check it out.