As many of you noticed while testing Windows 8 Consumer Preview some Media Center addins work and some don’t and fellow MVP Niall Ginsbourg has found some more details about the changes to the Windows 8 CP version of Media Center. As I noticed during my testing Windows 8 Media Center has been built around version 4 of the .net framework where as the Windows 7 version used .net 2.0 so some addins that reference Media Center assemblies will need recompiling by developers. Niall has spent some time on the problem and got his Big Screen EGP application running on Windows 8, as he says if probably the first 3rd party EPG app for Windows 8 Media Center running.
It’s disappointing that Windows Media Center developers are working blind to try and get their addins working currently in Windows 8, there have been no released notes and no information passed to the Media Center developer community so it looks like its going to trial and error for Media Center developers working with Windows 8.
Checkout Niall’s post for the details of how he got it working.
So hence a bit of tinkering, recompiling and the like was required (using a modified Big Screen EPG version). That is – a test of my kung-fu, pitted against the dastardly plan by Microsoft to provide no technical/developer information or release notes to the public under any circumstances. Luckily I won – and was able to get my first EPG import going. I suspect this may have been the very first successful import done by anyone outside of MSFT (as quite a few things needed to be changed) – so I proudly took a screenshot below for safe keeping :
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