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Windows Media Center development hints, tips, tutorials and information
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OK - I've put an incomplete version of the book online at the Push-A-Button website - http://push-a-button.com/products/books/index.php You are welcome to download it and have a read. If you like it or find it valuable, PLEASE consider donating, since Read More...
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OK - people seem a little interested in the idea of a book, and "Cheap PDF" seems to be popular. Personally, I'm thinking the same route because it allows be to embed hyperlinks into the document - and the book is best used when you have Visual Studio Read More...
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I'm working on a Media Center development book - would people be interested in buying a book on how to develop applications in Media Center? If so, what would be more appealing? A large bound volume, or an inexpensive PDF copy? I'm sitting on 130 pages Read More...
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Some people have had issues trying to make 'popup menus' in Media Center applications. Since I've been adding a similar function to EMUCenter to support some of the new features, I thought I'd cover how to do it. The answer is actually very straight-forward. Read More...
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Microsoft are of the opinion that users of Media Center applications do not want 3rd party apps to look like or work like Media Center itself. This is at odds with 99% of the feedback I've ever recieved as a Media Center developer, but I quote Charlie Read More...
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Ok - many people still have some trouble visualising their interfaces when it comes to writing their MCML. They don't know where to start, or what to do. I'm going to take a page from an MCML application and show you how to 'de-construct' it to figure Read More...
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There is a bit of confusion out there about which rule to use in which situation when writing rules in your MCML application. I'll just quickly cover the scenarios here... Default vs Binding Rules To be honest, you can actually use a Binding rule as a Read More...
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OK, although this isn't about GENERAL Media Center development and is more of a self-serving plug, I'm going to go ahead anyway and show you how to write a plugin for Yougle. I get a lot of requests for particular video, audio and (to a lesser extent) Read More...
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Although this really isn't really very difficult from what's been explained before, some people have trouble with getting their controls to interact - to change one control based on another. So I thought I'd spend a little time covering the basics, so Read More...
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There are times when the response from a click is going to take a little while - fetching information from a web page, downloading a file, queuing a video...some of these things take time, and the user doesn't like to have their Media Center 'lock up' Read More...
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Oh, I've finally released the new version of EMUCenter, which has a few new bells and whistles. If people are interested, you can download it from my new community site at http://community.push-a-button.com.au (please register before you can download Read More...
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This is a reasonably advanced topic, but since I've only just discovered the solution for it, I decided I may as well post it here so people who need the solution can use it. Large scrollers can sometimes be a problem when you need to do large 'jumps' Read More...
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I've started a new Open Source project, in the hope that other people are interested in contributing to it. Installing Media Center addins is a bit of an annoyance. You've got this really pretty Media Center interface, but for people who are trying to Read More...
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If you're wondering what on earth I've been doing lately, I've been fiddling with some of my own projects lately. http://www.push-a-button.com.au/downloads/BlindTimerSetup.msi - a 32 bit version of a simple poker game timer. It tells you the current blinds Read More...
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Ian Dixon has kindly donated the developer forum to let us all discuss the topics I'm covering on this blog. So if you have any questions, want to discuss possible features for TriviaCenter or even post code and suggestions, please feel free to jump in. Read More...
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OK, we can now answer trivia questions and keep a score...but you've got to keep watching that darn bottom corner to see if you got it right or not! So how about we add a little more feedback to the questions by having it obvious if you were right or Read More...
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Charlie from Microsoft has made a post commenting on my last blog entry - writing an installer with the standard Setup Project in Visual Studio on the sandbox blog ( http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/UseTheRegistrationAPIWiX.aspx ) - oh, and thanks Aaron Read More...
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OK, now there are interesting problems when installing an application for Media Center, because there are two different ways of registering your application. To appear in Media Center, several entries need to be made to the Windows Registry. In the first Read More...
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Allright - are you like me, and you've had enough of playing with this scroller? It's time to hang that up and start working on something REAL. Our first step is to go to a new MCML page. This first page is handy, but it's now done it's job - the user Read More...
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Now we go back to our scroller. We've made our list scroll, show the current selection, work with the keyboard and mouse...but it's still easy to get lost in our list of options. Unless it's clear that there are more options above or below those showing Read More...
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There's still a few tricks we can do to make our Scroller work and look better - and one of them is going to also show us the art of binding . This topic is going to be a little hairy. Stick with me, because it will teach you some very important concepts. Read More...
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We are making real progress now in doing things with our interface. But there are a couple of 'housework' items we need to do before we can say we are ready to move on to the next part of our program. The next question we need to ask ourselves is simple Read More...
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Now, a game with a fixed list of categories isn't exactly flexible. What we are going to need is the ability to create a list from our code , so we can load the category list when the program is running. This will let people add new categories of question Read More...
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If anyone is reading these, feel free to leave some comments. With all the silence, I'm feeling all cold, alone and unappreciated :) Nah - I just want to make sure people are really READING these. If nobody is using them, it's kinda silly for me to bother Read More...
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Now we have a nice responsive button - it's time to do something when the user clicks. For this, we are again going to use rules. The first thing we are going to need is a way to see if we have been clicked. If you check the SDK documentation, you'll Read More...
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We've got some great little buttons - that do absolutely nothing . Allright, we have our mission - let's make these things move and respond to presses. First, let's make them visibly respond to having the mouse rolled over them. The first thing we have Read More...
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OK - we have a base to work with - an MCML file that describes a nice little layout for our application, and a C# file that is used to provide data to it. Now, how about we make this thing a little bit more interactive? In our game, we are going to need Read More...
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This stage isn't too hard once you understand the tricks behind it. Let's hook our new MCML file up to C#. Because of the Model-View seperation that is part of the basic design of Media Center Markup Language projects (see my post on Model-View Seperation Read More...
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Right, now let's begin playing with our application. Our first order of business is to show something a little bit more informative that 'hello' on the main screen. To do this, we are going to use one of the UI's that are included with MCMLookalike (and Read More...
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Today I'm starting a series of blog posts - we are going to work together to build a Media Center application. The best way to learn a new technology is DOING something with it. So we are going to make a very simple trivia game in the Media Center Markup Read More...
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Creating a Title Control As I've mentioned before, UI elements have four components. Content , Properties , Rules and Locals . To make reusable, flexible controls from a UI, we will need to use properties. Let's start by creating a page heading - the Read More...
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Just to prove that I'm not completely making all of this up, I've got an alpha version of a program you may want to try. For those people who love classic arcade action (and have managed to troll eBay to find yourself an arcade machine board or two), Read More...
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In this day in age, I'm assuming that you've been exposed to HTML or XML before, since it's hard to be a programmer and not have touched either one for at least a few moments. So today we are going to jump straight into the first piece of the MCML puzzle Read More...
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Before we start our first MCML program, you are going to need two components. First, your development environment. Throughout this blog, I will be talking about developing in Visual Studio 2005. You may also be able to perform exactly the same actions Read More...
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For beginners to MCML, the most difficult thing to get used can be the idea of model-view separation. Some developers may be very familiar with it – the basic concepts have been used for quite some time, particularly in the Document-View architecture Read More...
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OK - today we are going to look at the basics of developing for Media Center. There are basically three methods of writing software for Media Center. Hosted HTML Applications The first way is the only way that is backwards compatible with Windows XP's Read More...
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Before I even begin talking about the dark arts of Media Center development, let's go over some of the sites that will help you on your journey of discovery. Media Center SDK : Here The Media Center SDK for Windows Vista. If you are going to do ANYTHING Read More...
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Your reading the first in what will hopefully be a long list of blog postings passing on useful hints, tips, advice and tutorials on developing applications for Windows Media Center. The Media Center development experience is an interesting one. There's Read More...
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