Open Live Writer

I’ve been a fan of using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer to compose blog posts for quite a few years now, so when it stopped working earlier this year due to Google changing the authentication requirements for Blogger, I was a bit disappointed. The good news was that Microsoft contacted Google and (for once) they extended Live Writer a lifeline to allow it to continue to use the old API until alternate arrangements could be made.

All was good just over a week ago, when a) Microsoft released an open source version of Live Writer – named Open Live Writer, and b) Google finally did switch off the old authentication API. Unfortunately the first new release of Open Live Writer didn’t have a working implementation of Google’s new authentication API, so there was a few days of inconvenience whilst that was finished off. Version 0.5.1.2 came out last Friday and I’m pleased to find that it does work again with Blogger!

The source code is on Github at https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter, and there’s already an active community contributing bug reports and pull requests.

It’s great to see such a useful application given a new lease on life (or should that be ‘new lease on live’ 😀 )

Windows 10 Mobile on Lumia 920

(I wrote this post on 10th December, but was waiting for Open Live Writer to support Blogger)

So this happened.. Last week I reset my phone so that Narelle could use it for a day (hers had broken the previous day). Once I replaced hers and got my handset back, I reset it again and started re-installing all my apps. Windows Phone may not be the most popular phones around, but one of the nice things about them is that they do automatic backups, and by default save all your contacts to the cloud, so there isn’t much you can accidentally lose.

So after reinstalling everything I thought “hmm.. Maybe I should try out the Windows 10 update”. I’d resisted this urge previously as I’d read lots of reports of how unstable it was, but now the new 950/950XL handsets are out which come with Windows 10, and there’s just been an additional update since then too. Worst case I can use the support tool to reset my phone back to Windows Phone 8.1 again.

The install took a little while (maybe an hour?).

I did notice the battery seemed to run down a bit on the first day – admittedly that day included the update which would have used a bit of juice.

The trouble is it’s hard to know if that is just Windows 10, or my handset – I’ve seen it occasionally do similar things with 8.1.

Windows 10 Mobile looks quite nice. The upgrade kept my icons on the start screen, though the layout needed tweaking as the size of the icons seemed to have changed slightly.

Some of the apps are updated (eg. News, Mail, Calendar). Actually I think I prefer the 8.1 News app, but the new one is ok. I have two mail accounts on my phone, and they ended up being combined. Not sure if there’s a way to un-combine them.

Some pluses – they finally have an Australian keyboard option (Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!). The browser is also the latest Edge version.

Some minuses – possibly due to my older handset – I find the response time for various things quite slow. Even just turning the phone on and unlocking has a noticeable delay. The opposite is true of scrolling. It seems a bit too sensitive, and I often end up scrolling way further than I intended.

I’m going to stick with it for a little while and see how I go. If the battery does prove to be a problem then reverting back to 8.1 might be the best option.

Getting CA2213 warnings after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 1

I installed Update 1 for Visual Studio 2015 this morning and then upon reopening an existing solution I noticed some new warnings/errors listed in the Error List panel:

The problem was that warning didn’t appear before the update, and inspecting the code revealed that in fact that class did implement IDisposable and did dispose the field in question. What’s going on here – surely this isn’t a bug in Update 1?

That was my original thought, but then I remembered that this project references the Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.FxCopAnalyzers Code Analyzer NuGet package. I wonder if that package needs an update?

Let’s fire up the NuGet Package Manager and make use of the new ‘Updates’ tab to find out..

Yes, there are! A quick check of the Select all packages checkbox and click on the Update button, and tada – no more warnings 😀