As my last post infers, I've made the proverbial leap from my previous blog engine, to BlogEngine.NET.

Since I use Windows Live Writer for most of my blogging, I had to set it up to work with the new blog. Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

Windows Live Writer is a free program just out of beta that is part of Microsoft's "Live" suite of tools. It's a Windows application that provides spell checking, an open plugin-architecture, online and offline draft support, and basically makes blogging a whole lot easier (and faster!). What's more, it can connect with virtually any blog engine (including many of the free, hosted solutions). If you're not using this software by now you owe it to yourself to get a copy and check it out.

Now, on to the guts of the post... I needed to add my new BlogEngine.NET blog to Windows Live Writer (WLW), to do so, fire up WLW, go to the Tools menu, choose Accounts, then click Add.  You'll notice that BlogEngine.NET isn't in the list, don't let this worry you, just choose "Another weblog service" and click Next. Fill in the information requested on the next page, and click Next.

There is where the openness of BlogEngine.NET begins to shine. From the list choose "MetaWeblog API", then supply your Remote Posting URL (this is the URL that WLW will interface with when posting your articles, for BlogEngine.NET it's going to be something like this: http://www.yourblogsite.com/yourblogdirectory/metaweblog.axd). Finish up the configuration wizard, if this is your first blog in WLW, you're done; if this is another blog that you're adding (yes, you can post to any of multiple configured blogs from WLW) you just need to make sure you're blogging to the right blog (click on the Weblog menu to change between those that you have configured).

That's it.

You can thank me later.