Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of barfing. For all the gory details (you have been warned), check out my wife’s blog.

• Only 12 responses to the State of the Union were posted as I write this. Dunno why, but I was expecting more. Maybe this whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown a bit! 😄
• Speaking of the State of the Union, is it just me, or did anyone else find it odd that the Scooter Libby trial started the same day?
• AtlasASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is done. Lots more on this from Scott Guthrie’s blog. While I’m not personally that interested in ASP.NET AJAX itself, two things strike me as interesting in this release. First, we’re shipping all the code for this. The client side JavaScript library, the Control Toolkit, even the server-side components. Second, it’s nice to see the Developer Division shipping something this significant without waiting for the next release of Visual Studio. Here’s hoping that both of these two trends continue.
• Rich McCollister pointed me to the XmlProviderLibrary. Bad on me for not looking harder.
• Windows Live Writer is pretty cool, but it is missing one feature that I needed twice Tuesday. While embedding images in a post is cake, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed non-image files. You know, like the ColorConsoleTraceListener Project or the Live Search for Chartity Search Providers. I’m guessing the infrastructure to post images and files would be identical, but there’s no UI interface for it. I checked out the WLW SDK online and found the ISmartContent.Files.Add method, so I’m guessing it’s doable. But there’s no such animal on the Live Gallery. I wonder why nobody else has built this yet? Is this really that unique a request?

Dare posts about two charity search sites hosted by Live Search. Use teamseattle.live.com to search and you help sponsor Children’s Hospital. Use click4thecause.live.com to search and you help sponsor Ninemillion.org, which is working to help the 9 million refugee children worldwide.

GIven that I’m already using Live Search, changing my default search page from Live.com to one of these two seems was a no brainer. I use the IE7 Search Box more often than not, so I also set up a custom search provider. However, that’s a bit of a PITA, so I took the OpenSearch Description XML files and hosted them here @ DevHawk. Click the links below to add them to IE7 search box.

• Add Click4TheCause Charity Search to your IE7 Search Box
• Add TeamSeattle Charity Search to your IE7 Search Box

I’m sure there’s a way to do this for Firefox’s search bar, but I have no idea how. If you – dear reader – know how to add search providers, please send me email and I’ll update this post accordingly.

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:

• Standard Xbox.com Gamer Card
• MGC.net Gamer Card image with link to Xbox.com Profile
• MGC.net Gamer Card image with link to MGC.net Profile
• MGC.net Gamer Card image only
• MGC.net Gamer Card flash movie

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:

• App Launcher – so you can add a “Blog It” button to some other app to remotely launch WL Writer. I assume this is how the WL Toolbar intergration works.
• Content Source – so you can add some type of custom content to a post. Typical examples would be Technorati tags or Currently Listening To info.

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!