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A user of EMUCenter showed me his new Media Center remote a few days ago on my forums, and I discovered that Microsoft has left out the '#' and '*' buttons on the latest generation of their control. Of course, MS has always stated that there is no guarantee that those particular buttons...
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Two things I'll mention today - one is to do with development, one is a tip for those having trouble with Media Center startup since installing the TV Pack. Part 1 - Installing on Media Center with the TV Pack Installed 'Fiji' - or the Media Center TV Pack - is a MUST have for Media Center...
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For those who haven't noticed, my new applications are shipping with Addinistrator. The basic idea of Addinistrator is allowing users to have much better control over their Start menu and other entry points for Media Center applications. It lets you choose which two Start menus are visible, create...
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I haven't really covered how to interact with Media Center itself through much of these posts. Although there isn't a lot you can actually get Media Center to do, it's often vital to make your application play different types of media or have some control over the Media Center experience...
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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 it takes quite a bit of time to write up a document...
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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 available to play with right then and there, anyway...
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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 at the moment, and I've only just covered where...
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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. The main problem with pop-up menus is the...
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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 Owen from MS - The pool of customers we listen to...
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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 out how it's made. The basic trick is to imagine...
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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 Default rule fairly seamlessly, but it's not really...
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Hi everyone, some of you already know me from around the community, I'm the silent one who sits and makes the occasional stealth post now and then over at the Green Button. My nick name is Lindz, so don't be surprised if I sign emails with it sometimes :) I am a Microsoft employee and technical enthusiast...
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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' while they are waiting for it. When this happens...
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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' within them. The best example of this is the 'type...
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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 the current ante and how long until they next...
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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. And if you want a little bit of a chat about Media...
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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 wrong. To do that, we are going to need another UI...
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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 Stebner for point this out on his blog at http...
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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 release of the Windows Media Center SDK (and in...
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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 can now choose a category. But to ask a question...
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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 on the current screen, your users can easily be...
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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. First, let's look at our program. If you are...
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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 - 'what happens when there are a lot of categories...
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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 without needing to completely re-compile the...
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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 writing them! So if you found one of these posts...
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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 find that there's actually no way you can do this...
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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 to do is create a rule . As I may have covered in...
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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 to give people the option to choose between categories...
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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 ), you should carefully plan out exactly what...
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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 that I described in this post ). We are going to...
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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 Language together, across several stages. To start...
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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 fading-out text that appears in the top-right corner...
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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), I've created MAMECenter, an interface to let you play...
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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 - the UI. The term UI traditionally stands for...
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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 in Visual C# Express Edition (the free version from...
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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 found in a number of programming languages (including...
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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 as a developer with Media Center, make sure you...
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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 a fairly steep learning curve to MCML development...