Windows Media Center Software Development Kit for Windows 7 RTM Now Available

While I have been away Microsoft put out the RTM version of the Windows Media Center SDK, good news but Niall Ginsbrough warns that you should stick with the Vista Media Center SDK if you want to will want to target Vista.

The reason for this is that while you’ll get pretty much nothing to shout about in this new SDK over Vista, the big downside is that your app’s created with this SDK (and compiled against WIndows 7 Media Center API’s) will not work in Vista.  Whereas – if you develop against the Vista API’s – and tweak your Installer’s accordingly – your apps should work fine on Windows 7 (nb: if you’re developing against the ehRec dll’s or some of the other “non MCPL” functionality this may break on TVPack or Windows 7).  At the moment (and at least for next 6-12 months) – the market for Windows 7 Media Center users would be pretty small (well even smaller than Vista that is) – so you’re better off ensuring you’re supporting both these platforms.

Niall seems pretty disappointed with the SDK and the lack of support from Microsoft for Media Center as a developer platform. I wonder if Silverlight and WPF are the way forward, I have played with MCML but its not easy to get started and don’t seem to get much support from MS…

Instead – the majority of alternate options for development are enabled via the support for IE browser hosted addins – which in turn allow you to use Silverlight, Flash and even WPF/XBAP applications (which can still be used in the browser ‘host’ – regardless of whether they have token ‘native’ support by Media Center). All of these alternative platforms seem to go the full 9 yards and the whole dev and release cycle seem to have been properly thought out and followed through (wheras MCPL offered very raw dev support with no WYSIWYG designers, poor documentation – and as mentioned the ‘actual’ developer support was non existent – and any hope of future enhancements or improvements looks extremely bleak).