If you have a blog website or thinking about setting one up, there is one tool that can make writing and publishing your posts a lot easier.  It is called Windows Live Writer, also known as WLW.  This application allows you to create and publish right from your computer without having to log in to your blog website on the internet from a web browser.  It is a great application and makes adding new content a snap.  There are many great features.  I encourage anyone that has a blog and doesn’t use it, to at least read about it and see if it can help you simplify your blog posting process.

If you are interested in trying it out, download Windows Live Writer from here, it’s FREE!

The next section is a quick walk through of connecting WLW to your blog.

Note: You will need a blog website and a user account setup for that website to actually go through these steps successfully.

1.) Install WLW and choose your blog service

After you download and install Windows Live Writer (WLW), hooking it up to your blog site is a breeze.  Running WLW for the first time will allow you to configure the application so it can “talk” to your blog site.  Whether you have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, or any other popular blog service such as Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad, it will be smart enough to know how to interact with your service/website.  As a great example, my website is powered by the very popular open-source BlogEngine.NET and the Windows Live Writer application detected everything with no problems.  In my specific example, when I ran WLW for the first time I received the following dialog.  I chose the last option “Other blog service”, and clicked the “Next” button.

2.) Enter your blog information

At the next prompt, simply enter your blog website address, username and password.  Then click the “Next” button.

Windows Live Writer will do its song and dance, connect to your website, and download all the configuration and style theme information it needs.  This was really cool, I was amazed that it worked so well.  After this step, you will be ready to write your first blog post with Windows Live Writer!

3.) Write a blog post!

This blog post was composed in WLW.  The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface uses your current blog website’s style theme.  You can instantly see what your post is going to look like as you type.  Gone are the days of editing raw HTML and hoping your layout, style and colors come out as you intend.

Here is a screenshot of this actual blog post being composed in Windows Live Writer:

Windows Live Writer is an essential tool in the toolbox of any blogger who uses the Windows operating system.

Wow that was a long title, but here is how to get them to show up again.

If you use Microsoft Visual Studio for development for any period of time, you can get used to using those handy dropdown boxes to quickly “jump to” a method in the class file your are currently working in.  If you are not familiar with this feature in Visual Studio, I recommend enabling it.  It can increase your productivity as a developer, and helps you pop around your source code a lot faster than scrolling manually.

But what happens if they disappear?

One day after importing some custom settings to change my text editor syntax color theme, those two code navigating dropdown boxes disappeared (the two dropdown boxes highlighted in yellow in the above picture).  I spent a half hour trying to figure out how to get them back. 

I eventually gave up and resorted to just using the “Find” Ctrl+f shortcut key combination every time I wanted to navigate to a method.  It seemed like I was getting used to it.  It seemed like it was fast enough.  But working in a large solution, it was very easy to forget what a function or property was named.  It became counter-productive.

Finally after weeks of relying on Ctrl+f to navigate thru my source code, I got fed up.  After searching thru the Tools>Options menu in Visual Studio, I FOUND IT!

Here’s what you have to do to get the dropdown boxes back that let you “jump to” and navigate thru your source code.

NOTE: This step-by-step process shown below uses Visual Studio 2008

1.) From your IDE’s top menu, go to Tools>Options…

2.) Expand ‘Text Editor’, click ‘All Languages’, and find the checkbox labeled ‘Navigation bar’.  This checkbox is what determines if those dropdown boxes are displayed in your IDE.

3.) Check the ‘Navigation bar’ checkbox.  Then click the ‘OK’ button.

4.) Now the dropdown boxes will be displayed in your IDE!  If you have a file open in your environment, click on the dropdown box and find an item to “jump to” in your source code.  All items in the list are sorted in alphabetic order.

5.) After choosing an item in the ‘Navigation bar’ dropdown box, the text editor will “jump to” that item automatically, saving you time. 

No more manually scrolling or having to rely solely on Ctrl+f to find what you are looking for in your source code!  Use it, abuse it, and increase your productivity as a developer!

Hope this tip helps someone out there.