Microsoft launches Windows Live Writer (download), a new publishing tool for authoring rich blog posts on Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, Typepad and other blogging services.

The first thing to notice about Writer is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. Writer knows the styles of your blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes and enables you to edit your post using these styles.

Writer also includes other views including HTML source-code editing and web preview mode.

Now you don't have to waste time going through the process of publishing, refreshing, previewing, and tweaking your post to get it looking the way you want. It's all right there in Writer as you create your post.