Earlier this week the Windows Live team released the new Windows Live Writer blog posting and management tool that you can download and use for free. It is a desktop application that provides a really nice editing environment for writing blog posts (spell checker, layout manager, offline editing support, etc).
Best of all, Windows Live Writer works with pretty much any server blog software out there, including Community Server (which is the excellent blog software I use to host this blog). This is actually my first post using the Windows Live Writer application with it. :-)
Eric Cherng has put together a really nice Windows Live Writer walkthrough that shows off how to install and use it to write your first blog post. You can checkout his post on how to-do this here.
One of the cool things about the application is that it is written using .NET, and it exposes a nice .NET extensibility model for creating plugins. It has only been out a few days, but already there are some really cool extensions built by the .NET community appearing.
Keyvan Nayyeri has a nice post on how he built a tagging plugin that you can read here. Tim Heuer has created two new CodePlex source projects for a flickr and tagging plugin that you can download and read about here.
Fun stuff!
Scott