For all the people that have bitched at me, for not wanting to do multi-blog support for SharpMT, here's a new offline blogging candidate:

Windows Live Writer

I gave it a look, considering that I work for the company that makes it. Was impressed to find that it auto-recognized my TypePad blog. Was also happy to see it grab all of my categories and - rather frankly - I kinda like the way they let you select multiple categories. The multi-view of WYSIWYG versus plain text is spiff, too.

Am I giving up SharpMT for it? Not in the way you might think.

Writer is good. I used it before it hit the streets, actually, so I had more time to play with it than most people have. Problem is that it has the same "limitations" as other writers that I've tried: it's not going to be up to filling my MT/TypePad-specific needs. It gives me a lot of fields to enter text in, but it doesn't include all of them. It also doesn't deal with Text Filters. Actually, I don't think I'd even need Text Filter support, considering that Writer does a lot of formatting for me, but the existing 1030 posts that do? Not a great fit for me. Since SharpMT has been stable for some time, I'll be sticking with it, for blog writing.

I know I've said this before but I'll say it once more and this time I really mean it: I think I'm done. With the exception of multi-blog support and tagging, what's left to do? Palm support? J2ME support? Not a chance. Not at all worth a re-write and certainly nothing I'm interested in. Multi-blog support? Not worth a re-write because I don't have a need for it. Tagging? Ditto: I don't have need for it so I have no desire to add it. I've never been shy about it... if I don't have the desire to do it, it probably won't get done. True, the last 20 features came from users, but they helped to grow the product while I was still working on the product.

What's next?

Got me. I was considering moving the source to a company that had a vested interest in TypePad and MovableType, but seeing as they went and made their own PDA-based client, I'm content to leave them alone. And now my employer is in the same space... might be time to do the chess thing and take a square to the right, to get outta the way.

The question is, is it worth posting the source code to a place like Codeplex? Anyone?

Anyone?