I’ve been using Windows Azure Blob storage for a while now as a place to host Silverlight videos and other large objects in the cloud that I want to incorporate into my blog.  To make it easier to embed Azure blob items in blog posts, I recently put together a plugin for Windows Live Writer to make this easy.  The plugin was just accepted into the Windows Live Writer Plugin Gallery and is now available for download.

Once installed, it appears on the insert menu in Writer:

And allows you to browse your blob storage containers and insert items either as a link or embedded as an <img> or <iframe>.  This means that if you’ve uploaded videos from Expression Encoder using the Windows Azure Publishing Plugin, you can embed these.  The plugin also supports the CDN feature of Azure Blob Storage if you have those enabled.

The plugin is the spiritual successor to the Silverlight Streaming Writer plugin that I wrote a few years ago that surprisingly got downloaded over 10,000 times.  It remains to be seen how popular Azure Blob Storage is as a means of hosting user generated content and thus if there will be any interest in this version; this will largely come down to how easy it is to sign up for an account and how the pricing works out in the real word.  From a personal perspective I’ll be extremely interested to see how much my Azure January virtual bill ends up at in comparison to what I pay for Amazon S3 storage.  It will also be interesting to see how the CDN features end up getting priced.

As a followup to the Writer Plugin, I’m currently in the process of preparing an update to the Azure Publishing Plugin for Expression Encoder that supports large object upload, resumable uploads as well as some other features.  Once that’s done I’ll then be doing an end-to-end post here covering the automated PowerShell/Expression Encoder/Azure workflow that I presented at PDC09 in my chalk & talk and used for the video’s I posted from PDC.

Stay tuned and, if you are an Azure Blob storage user, let me know what features you want in the Writer Plugin.