Monday, June 4, 2007

Windows Live Writer Spell Checking missing

imageI notice after installing the latest beta of Windows Live Writer that "Check Spelling" was missing from the Tools menu and if I spell wrong I want to have this working. But as you can see on the images I got the spell checking enabled.

  image

It seems that since don't have en-US culture WLW starts without spell checking available. This will probably be fixed in the next version but until then you can use this small freeware application launcher that solves this. Download WLWSCL.zip and extract WLWSCL.exe to for example the WLW install folder and run it.

One tip is to create a shortcut to WLWSCL.exe and set the Start in folder to where WLW is installed. It could be "C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer". This solved some issues I had when I used Steve Dunn's great Code Formatter Plugin.

This is the code. (Update: Does not render correct in Google Reader so look directly on my blog)

Imports System.Globalization Imports System.Threading Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim exe As String = My.Computer.Registry.GetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Live Writer", "InstallDir", "").ToString & "WindowsLiveWriter.exe" If Not IO.File.Exists(exe) Then MsgBox("The path to WindowsLiveWriter.exe cannot be found.", MsgBoxStyle.Critical, "Error") End End If Dim app As System.AppDomain = System.AppDomain.CreateDomain(exe) Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New CultureInfo("en-US") app.ExecuteAssembly(exe) End Sub End Module

Ref. the comments to this post.

7 comments:

  1. Restored comment
    by Sinan Yüce
    I tried to do that, but when I execute the code, here is the error I get:

    "To run this application, you first must install one of the following versions of the .NET Framework:
    v2.0.50727
    Contact your application publisher for instructions about obtaining the appropriate version of the .NET Framework.
    The funny thing is that I have installed that version of .NET Framework. Is the problem due to the fact I use different language version of .NET framework other than English? But this is also interesting because what is the point to use this program if I have already have English Windows and installed English .NET Framework?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Restored comment
    sinan,
    I don't know what the problem is on your machine.
    The point to have this is if you have another language format selected to show numbers, currencies, dates and time. The reason is that the spell checker is not working in WLW and this program solves that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Restored comment
    by Lex Mark
    Thanks for your patch for Windows Live Writer Beta 2. However, it is not working with WLW Beta 3. Will there be a new patch?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Restored comment
    by JTB World
    lex mark, from my tests it seems like Beta 3 has solved this issue. I was able to start it without my 'fix' and even though I have Swedish locale the spelling works.
    Can you describe more what your problem is?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Restored comment
    by JTB World
    I have made a new release that works with B3 and according to lex mark it works for him.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Restored comment
    by skizofrenik
    Hi!

    There's an easy way to get spell checking on WLW beta 3. There's a file called 'loc' on Live Writer folder. Open it with notepad and change the content to 'en-US'. Save and exit!
    The only downsize is that Live Writer's interface is also presented in English rather then the Windows localisation..

    kind regards,
    skizofrenik

    ReplyDelete
  7. Chris said...

    Thanks, this is just what I needed - after updating WLW, I just could not figure out where the spell checker had gone.
    July 04, 2007

    ReplyDelete