Open Live Writer is finally here!

Just over a week ago Scott Hanselman dropped the news that an open source version of the popular Windows Live Writer blogging application has finally been released. The Windows Live Writer application has been a popular publishing platform for years, but has not been updated since 2012. Earlier this year Hanselman ignited the communities interest by tweeting that talks were under way to open source the app.

@pzerger @rodtrent we are going to open-source live writer, so don't worry

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) June 10, 2015

The wait is finally over. You can download it here:

http://openlivewriter.org/

The application is still “old” compared to 2015 standards… but now that it is open source, I’m confident the community is going to run with it. Just in the past week the authentication for the popular Blogger service has been updated to work with the OAuth 2.0 spec.

Happy Blogging!

Let’s Encrypt!

Just last week LetsEncrypt.org entered public beta. This is newsworthy because SSL and TLS security are becoming more and more important for web applications, and the developers that create them. I won’t go into the details of the importance of using SSL and other stronger forms of transport layer security (TLS). There's a plethora of information on the web, as well as my favorite training site, Pluralsight.com. But, it suffices to say, if you are creating a web app these days, you need to be using SSL.

Asynchronous Task Containers

A few years ago I posted about using Action delegates to create logical containers to encapsulate functionality. This technique is a good example of DRY programming, and it is very useful in scenarios where you are performing similar operations with different parameters such as calling a database or service.

iTextSharp hates your HTML5

When it comes to PDF generation in .Net there aren't many open source projects to choose from, so by default many people choose the most popular community driven project, iTextSharp. With a relatively easy learning curve and decent API, iTextSharp can address most simple scenarios for generating PDF's, and with a little more effort can render even more complex PDF's as well. iTextSharp has been essentially free using the LGPL license, but with the introduction of version 5, the AGPL license has clouded the waters a bit.

This post addresses a potential gotcha when using the iTextSharp XmlWorker to render HTML5 to PDF's.