Utility: Launch Windows Live Writer with Spelling Enabled

Windows Live Writer with Spelling Launcher can be downloaded here (13k).

I too, like Oren, found that my spell checker was not working with Windows Live writer, simply because my system was not configured to use the en-US culture. Alex posted some code on Oren's blog comments to enable launching Live Writer Beta 2 with spelling enables by launching it from an AppDomain that has an en-US thread culture.

it worked, and I simply created a very simple console mode launcher that :

• detects the system special folder called Program files
• attaches "\Windows Live Writer\WindowsLiveWriter.exe" to the end
• launches it with the correct culture.

How to use:

Simply unzip and run this from anywhere on your machine. It should just work.

Thanks Alex!

[let's hope Microsoft won't pull a Jamie on me!]

PS, I changed the code a bit to look like this:

string progs = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles);
string exe = progs + @"\Windows Live Writer\WindowsLiveWriter.exe";

Another annoying thing about the recent beta of WLW: When you get an existing post to edit it, it wipes out the categories that you previously associated with it (I think it just neglects to "get" the categories as it retrieves the existing post item from the blog). Beware! When re-publishing an item, make sure to re-set the categories on the blog post.