I think I used this SDK back in the day but I'm now having problems adding it into Visual Studio. It might be because I haven't done any programming in 10+ years. Any help to get this working?

While the WMC community might not consider SoftSled to be the holy grail it once was, I am very stubborn and don't want to let the dream go so I thought I would share my progress. :)

The original SoftSled project was available on the CodePlex Archives and already had the majority of the tedious...

Hello! Does anybody have a good tutorial they can point me to on how to develop plugins/extensions for WMC?
I have Visual Studio, but not sure what to use to develop or what language. Thanks!

Add a search function to recorded TV section how would I do it cheers

For a while now I've been creating a tool to synchronise recording resume positions across multiple WMC machines (I have 4 WMC machines all sharing TV across the network and wanted to be able to pause a programme in one room and then resume in another, much like extenders offer). For the life of...

Microsoft’s Window Media Center has a mechanism to notify you of events inside Media Center, called the Media State Aggregation Service (MSAS).

The Media Center SDK includes a .NET assembly called MediaState, which you can use to hook up C# to MSAS, however it is possible to build C# classes that...

Hello, I really don't know enough about programming as I wish and have been putting a lot of my free time on the weekends to try and understand and learn.

Before I get deep into my project I want to know if anyone sees it feasible and maybe knows of an application that already achieves this.

My...

This is a small part of a nine part series he did about building WMC applications but I think he does a good job of explaining some of the basics.

Retrieved From:

Windows Media Center Platform in the PDC Build of Windows 7
The Windows 7 release of the Windows Media Center platform focuses primarily on small, targeted improvements to the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer and additions to the managed code object model to make all...

MCEPopups is a MCE background add in that opens up port 1982 and waits for specially formatted text strings.

As of version 0.3 it has the following capability:

Dialogs - Generate interactive dialogs and receive a response.
Query - Query whether it is playing content.
Control - Play, Pause or...

Preventing multiple instances of a Windows Media Center application from running at the same time from:
By default, when a user clicks on an entry point in the Windows Media Center UI to launch a Windows Media Center application, a new instance of the Windows Media Center hosting process...

I'm putting this here for anyone interested in creating their own themes in WMC. The advantage of this method is that you can add resource files for each page in WMC such as Movies, Music, etc.

I think this could be useful because the graphics in WMC are housed in reource files. You can view them by exporing the file with something like 7 zip.

I found this on the web archive for mediacentersandbox

ehExtHost32.exe =dword:00002328

That's for Win64. For Win32, it should be (untested):

ehExtHost.exe =dword:00002328

More info at

(0x2328 is 9000 in decimal; the default value for apps using the embedded webcontrol is 7000 which...

Media Center Markup Language Preview Tool Launcher Powertoy

Several weeks ago a few of us were helping out some friends in MCML creation and realized the Media Center Markup Language Preview Tool wasn't exactly optimized for testing with web applications (i.e., any time you need to type http://...

A Look at Media Center's Rendering Engine

In Part One, we examined the high-level architecture of the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer, including the relationship between its User Experience Framework and Rendering Engine. In this installment, we’ll take a more detailed look at the...

The goal of this series is to provide some technical background for Media Center application authors who are interested in what the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer is and how it works.

This post takes an introductory look at the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer’s internal components...

Update: I'm adding a mini-FAQ at the bottom as the comments and feedback arrives.

As part of the documentation updates for the upcoming revision of our Windows Media Center Software Development Kit I have been writing some topics on how to effectively use the MCML Preview Tool (MCMLPad.exe) during...

Debugging add-in assemblies in Windows Media Center

As many of you have probably noticed, it can be tricky to debug problems that occur while loading and running an add-in assembly hosted within Windows Media Center. Fortunately, there are 2 fixes in post-beta 2 builds of Windows Vista that make...

How to debug a running Windows Media Center application in Windows Vista using Visual Studio 2005

I have been working on some debugging topics that will hopefully eventually be included in the Windows Media Center SDK for Windows Vista, and I wanted to put some of these topics together and create...

Preventing multiple instances of a Windows Media Center application from running at the same time

By default, when a user clicks on an entry point in the Windows Media Center UI to launch a Windows Media Center application, a new instance of the Windows Media Center hosting process...

There are two main features:
1.The ability to launch a third party playback application when a HD DVD or BD disc is inserted into the drive and MCE is full screen. If MCE is not full screen then the regular 2’ Windows auto play is used.
2.The ability to launch a third party application if a HD...