Niall Ginsbourg the developer behind many great Windows Media Center applications has taken a first look at the Windows 7 Media Center development kit. (v6.0) It’s early days yet but I think Niall was impressed with some of the improvements and disappointed some of his wish lists items had not made it to this release. Read Niall’s post for the low down, I hope the improvements in Windows 7 and Windows Media Center will see a renewed enthusiasm from developers for the Media Center platform
What’s new in Media Center SDK v6.0
Once setup – v6 installs a similar set of components/tools to v5.3 (including the MCMLPad, MCML Sampler, Animation Tool) – a Help/Reference file and a desktop version of the MCML Sample Explorer. The SDK also installs required schemas/project templates into Visual Studio 2008 (and I think 2005) – so you can quickly get started on projects.
Inside the SDK directory – source code for the Z Sample application as well as the MCML Sampler examples are found (as per v5.3). Notably absent are the HTML and MSAS samples – which are now depreciated in the new Media Center Platform (but for the time being will still work to ensure backward compatibility). As XBAP/WPF addins were depreciated in the v5.3 SDK – these are now no longer natively supported (however as before – you can still use XBAP/WPF and Silverlight via HTML addins).
As the SDK is still a “pre-beta” – the documentation for the new Platform features are unfinished (many topics are currently empty placeholders) – although you can find a few changes (such as ‘whats new’ topics). Luckily – the MCML sample files contain some commented examples of a number of the new features – so these can be used in the meantime (and I was able to get a good understanding of their usage).
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