New Apps and Dev Tools for Windows Media Center

Former Windows Media Center team member Charlie Owen just put together a package of goodies for Media Center enthusiasts that includes a couple of WMC applications and a suite of developer tools called the “Windows Media Center SDK for Windows 7 Addendum.”

First up is a revamp of Veronica’s Radio, a demo application that was to debut at Mix 06 to show off the Media Center Markup Language. It was eventually cut from the talk, but was made available briefly to those who wanted to install it via a command line interface. Only a few folks ever did, though, due to its not so user-friendly nature. But now, thanks to an email from a WMC fan, Owen modified the markup, updated the radio stations and created an installer for the streaming music app. You can now grab it from here.

He also updated the simple “Time + Date” WMC Extra applet, which does exactly what it sounds like it does: it shows the date and time. The new version now works on Windows 7 and is available here.

Finally, he put together a package of goodies for WMC developers he dubbed the “Windows Media Center SDK for Windows 7 Addendum.” The unofficial collection includes the following tools:

• A couple of new and updated loose MCML samples (mostly to fix up the URLs to the defunct play.mediacentersandbox.com).
• Source code for the Sample Explorer application you find in the Extras Library after installing the SDK as well as the desktop browsing tool. This is a good example of one approach for creating a testing / automation framework for your own application.
• Source code for Animation Explorer and Preview Tool Launcher desktop tools. The Preview Tool actually has a pretty robust automation model itself and this source shows you how to take full advantage for your own authoring tools.
• Source code for the Visual Studio 2008 templates included with the SDK. Perhaps someone in the community will update these and redistribute for Visual Studio 2010.
• Web Application Installer Template used to create the installers for the above applets. They are fully compatible with the InstallApplication Method in Windows 7 and can be used to craft installers for http://madeformediacenter.com/m4mc/.

Those are available as a zip file from here.