A few months back I had some creative energy to burn and so I started looking for an open source project to contribute to. It did not take me long to select Open Live Writer (OLW), it is a piece of software I have used and have in fact wrote about multiple times. OLW is a Windows Form app written in C# and while it has been more than 10 years since I have worked on desktop apps I was definitely up for it.
One of the many enhancement requests made for OLW was to provide a UI based mechanism for changing the default folder. In this way you could point your local drafts to One Drive or DropBox and effectively synch your posts to other PCs you may be working on. This was technically feasible via a registry hack but as with all things registry related it is not necessarily for the faint of heart.
The following image is exactly what I produced and I was happy to see my work folded into the master and the issue closed. My idea was to simply provide a reliable front end to the folder information stored in the registry. It took a bout 20 hours or so, including a brief recap of good Windows form design. These were actually my first formal contributions, and thankfully, I was patiently assisted by Kath Weaver and Scott Lovegrove.
Now that OLW is available via the Windows Store (any Windows app can be) there is a much more robust infrastructure for pushing updates to Window 10 Anniversary users.
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