Meh.

I'm a regular user of BlogJet, but I recently decided to give Live Writer a spin - I wasn't too impressed.

It has all the usual bells & whistles and frankly, redundant gold-plating that you would expect. However, when it came to actually /blogging/ with it, I found Live Writer to be a poor performer next to the austere BlogJet.

LiveWriter tended to be sluggish, consume rampant amounts of memory, and while it did work well with my blog engine (dasBlog) it just didn't feel as "tight" as BlogJet.

And here's the coup de grace: After reviewing Live Writer (free) I *paid* for BlogJet's unlimited license.

CRC.

WLW has a lot of neat features that I like (one that I like is its ability to download and use your current blog theme while writing) , however it is full of little things that make it really annoying (it's formatting of inline css styles, javascript and html, leaves paragraph tags open, horrible HTML editor, lack of a Find & Replace ....) ... personally, I think the free version of FrontPage Express which came out around 1998 is 100x better, surprised that they didn't use it instead.

You can read my review (which was written in Live Writer) of it on my blog
http://www.carlj.ca/2007/10/08/10-free-blogging-editors/

"Windows Live Writer is first major product to use the .NET Framework and ship out of Microsoft's camp"

Submitter is not even close. Actual money-makers like Visual Studio, SQL2005, BizTalk, sharepoint, and the Windows Media Center Edition components all contain MILLIONS of lines of managed code each, and many others products contain 100k-1mil LOCs. Here's at least one reference for this: http://srtsolutions.com/blogs/billwagner/archive/2006/03/17/lies-damn-lies-and-statistics.aspx (MSDN downloads being the other obvious one). WLW is just another in a long line of free downloads written entirely in managed code--and while that's a distinction, I use other managed tools like XmlNotepad on a daily basis that have a better rep for stability and design.

I've been editing a Live Spaces blog using WLW every couple of days since the first public release in 2006. It definitely had a rocky start, but WLW has steadily improved to be a stable editor with decent features like blog-themed editing and inline spell check (along with the rest of the standard blog metadata fare), and a really simple plugin model that has spawned dozens of great plugins (esp. for developers). My only other experience with a blog writing tool to that point was using Semagic against LiveJournal. Semagic was fast and stable, but very basic and had some problems with Live Spaces. WLW works really well for Live Spaces (my only experience with it), but it really is a pig and has a very unoptimized feel about it. I hope that the next release addresses startup time, which is particularly slow. There are lots of blog editors out there; this one just happens to be free, simple, and works with a ton of blog engines.