Windows Live Writer Beta 3

Well, a new version of WLW, Windows Live Writer Beta 3 , is available . Its just a pity that I can’t install it. Why do Microsoft insist on writing these bundle application for installing many products at once? I can see the point for home users, but at work you always get something blocked. They should provide the choice of using the bulk installer or using a direct download link. This would allow companies to unblock a specific URL without allowing users to download and install one of the other, banned, applications.

As it is, if even one of the applications in the installer is banned, then they have to block the whole thing. This is what has happened in my company with _“WLInstaller.exe”, b_ecause it installs Messenger. This punishes the rest of us who want to use one of the other pieces of software…

As it is, I had to install Windows Live Writer Beta 2 , from a direct link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/e/c/1ecbf3be-298b-467c-84d8-6f86f01478d7/en-us/Install_WLWriter.exe

It took me about a week, after getting authorization, to get my download capability un-restricted in SurfControl. The Infrastructure team spent a while going back a fourth testing changes to get it working, all the while saying “It must be IE7!” or, “Do you have Office 2007, ah, that’s why! If you uninstall it it will work!” and other assorted rubbish.

What did it boiler down to? What did they have to do to get it working? Was it permissions? No! Was it IE7? No! Was it Office 2007? No!

They rebooted the server!

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