I'm brand new to blogging so I get overly excited about every little tool which might possibly make my life easier. It was about a month when I had first heard about LiveSpaces, and ever since then I have completely changed the way that I interact with the Internet. Now, instead of using Firefox for viewing all of my RSS feeds, I imported all of them to my Live.com homepage, also instead of using stupid MySpace for my social-network-time-killing activities I now use LiveSpace which is great. Although I do have one huge complaint about it, it doesn't support the ability to leave a comment on someone's page unless it is in reference to a blog entry. I'm sure it won't be long until someone makes a gadget for this but until then I think its gonna be hard to move anyone over from MySpace. Enough about that.

When first contemplating which .Net blog engine to use, I basically narrowed it down to Community Server and DasBlog. Although I thought Community Server looked much better (the dasBlog themes are lacking a lot), I decided to go with DasBlog mostly because I felt that some of the features in Community Server were overkill for the kind of blog which I was looking to start.

LiveWriter offers:

1. Manage your blog(s) from a local windows application.
2. Automagically upload all local images which were locally added to your posts. (for DasBlog this needs to be configured using FTP)
3. Bult-in publishing support for DasBlog, Community Server, Word Press, of course LiveSpace, and many more.
4. An SDK for developers to extend its functionality.

Download LiveWriter (beta)

Dont know about everyone else but I can't live without my intellisense, which is why I was so distraught when I first installed Visual Studio last Nov. '05 and noticed that intellisense was not supported in .skin files. So i've basically just been living with this for almost a year ago until I saw a post on how to fix this. (You can view it here)

Steps to enable

1. Go to Tools->Options menu.
2. Pick Text Editor -> File Extesion fom a tree at the left part of Options dialog.
3. Type skin in Extesion text box.
4. Select User Control Editor from Editor dropdown.
5. Click Add and then Ok to close dialog and re-open your skin files.

Figure 1 - Adding skin entry to file extension

 
Figure 2 - Proof

Now what I want to know is: why in the world wouldn't this be the default behavior?