Building A Search Plugin For Windows Live Writer

So, a few weeks ago, Lori asked me if I’d be up for writing a plugin for Windows Live Writer to insert DevCentral related links into her blog posts.  For those that don’t know about Windows Live Writer and post to a blog regularly, you are doing yourselves a disservice by not checking it out (that is, if you are a Windows user).

I’ve messed around with some Live Writer plugins in the past and figured this wouldn’t be too big a task.  In fact, Microsoft has made it brain-dead simple to build a plugin and hook into their UI.  Here’s the steps I took to build ours in C# with Visual Studio 2010.

Create a Class Library Project

The first step is to create the project.  In Visual Studio, go into the New Project wizard and select a Class Library project. 

You’ll then want to add a reference to the WindowsLive.Writer.Api.dll assembly that can be found in the Windows Live Writer installation directory.

The main class that is created will be the one that Live Writer hooks into.  You can tell Live Writer that this is the one you want to use by adding the following attributes before the class declaration