I've been using Mike's code-formatting plug-in for Live Writer and it's working great for me so I thought I'd try and put one together myself.

I've been finding that on Vista I'm using the Snipping Tool a lot as part of blog posting so I thought I'd drop out a little Writer plug-in that made that easier. (I think the Snipping Tool only showed up on the Tablet edition of XP but it's on Vista Ultimate - it may have been obtainable elsewhere in the past).

The bits that I built took about 5 minutes and they're here;

• Live Writer Snipping Tool PlugIn - Binaries
• Live Writer Snipping Tool PlugIn - Source

If you want to make it work then you take the binaries and drop them into your equivalent of;

c:\program files\windows live writer\plugins

Next time you run Live Writer you should see;

on your "Insert" panel on the right hand side. This will launch the snipping tool, let it copy its bitmap to the clipboard and then "paste" that into LiveWriter.

Note - you can configure options on the snipping tool to not always ask you to save and that if you configure the option to not copy to clipboard then the plugin will stop working;

That's it - it's dead basic, does very little but it's really useful to me. I've tried to produce this post using the tool so it'll be interesting to see if it works :-)

A couple of notes;

1. There's probably a better way of doing this - I really want to trick Live Writer into invoking its "Insert Picture" functionality but I'm not sure if I can.
2. I should really add some kind of options/editor so that the image can be formatted somewhat.
3. I played with building another plugin that uses the ISupportingFiles.AddFile API and I got it confirmed that there's a bug in that so avoid that API if you can right now.

Updates;

1. Changed to upload a .png rather than a .bmp