Now it is close to the end of 2015, but Windows Live Writer 2012 is still the best Windows blogging tool. For years I use a Windows Live Writer plugin called VSPaste for code snippets. With VSPaste, any code in any language can be copied from Visual Studio, and paste into Windows Live Writer with 100% accurate syntax highlighting.

However, VSPaste has a problem with Visual Studio 2015 RTM (not with RC) – the pasted HTML code always has a white background: <span style=”background: white;”>code. To quickly fix this, the easiest way is to decompile the source code of VSPaste.

VSPaste is a small dll located in Windows Live Writer’s plugin directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins\VSPaste.dll. It can be decompiled to a project with source code, by .NET reflector free trial version:

Reflector will ask for reference assembly, just point it to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\WindowsLive.Writer.Api.dll. Then it decompiles VSPaste.dll to a complete C# project.

Now open the VSPaste.csproj, and search for string “background”. Here it is:

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private void SyncColors(bool bgOnly)
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{
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    int? nullable;
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    int? nullable2;
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    if ((this.background != this.nextBackground) || ((((nullable = this.color).GetValueOrDefault() != (nullable2 = this.nextColor).GetValueOrDefault()) || (nullable.HasValue != nullable2.HasValue)) && !bgOnly))
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    {
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        if (this.color.HasValue || this.background.HasValue)
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        {
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            this.writer.Write("</span>");
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        }
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        this.color = this.nextColor;
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        this.background = this.nextBackground;
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        if (this.color.HasValue || this.background.HasValue)
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        {
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            this.writer.Write("<span style=\"");
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            if (this.color.HasValue)
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            {
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                this.writer.Write("color:");
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                this.writer.Write(this.colors.CssColor(this.color.Value));
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            }
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            if (this.background.HasValue)
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            {
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                if (this.color.HasValue)
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                {
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                    this.writer.Write(';');
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                }
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                this.writer.Write("background:");
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                this.writer.Write(this.colors.CssColor(this.background.Value));
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            }
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            this.writer.Write("\">");
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        }
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    }
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}

Just comment out the 2 highlighted statement and compile, then copy the new VSPaste.dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins. It is done. Please notice only debug build works here. Release build will crash. Now VSPaste works with Visual Studio 2015 again.