This is my first post to a blog using the still-in-beta Windows Live Writer. Here's what sold me on it (well, it's free, so there was really no selling involved), from Al Nyveldt's blog:

Once you have gone through the set up you can then use the WLW interface to type up your blog posts in style.  It makes handling images, formatting, and basically the whole process a pleasure to work with.  It is extremely handy for images as you just add the image to the post, pick a size and WLW will make a small thumbnail image for your post as well as link to the full size image automatically.  (You can change this default, but it is a nice time saver.)

There are also a bunch of cool plugins for WLW for inserting all sorts of things into your posts as well as functionality to pull up and edit older posts that need to be cleaned up.

Once you have a blog post typed up, you click Publish from the toolbar and it will upload your blog post and all the images for you automatically.

That all sounds marvelous to me, but I'm still a tad concerned about proper, semantic markup. Microsoft doesn't have a swell reputation for clean code. See: FrontPage, SharePoint, et. al.

I suppose if this post blows up, this will be the last time I use WLW (no, not The Big One). Otherwise, we could become BFF.