Media Center Interface Plug-in SDK
(last updated May 9, 2003)

Introduction

This SDK contains everything you need to create your own interface plug-in for Media Center.  An interface plug-in is a plug-in that seamlessly integrates into Media Center's interface to provide added functionality.  An interface plug-in can be just about anything you can imagine.  (an advanced tagging studio, an HTML control server, a playlist management tool, and on and on)  Luckily, you can build on all of Media Center's established power, so you don't have to deal with ugly low level details like tagging, controlling the system mixer, database management, etc.

Writing a component

The first thing you need to do to create an Interface plug-in is to choose a language.  Any language that supports COM should work fine. (C++, VB, etc.)  Once that's out of the way, you need to create a new COM control that has a user interface.  Then, there are two requirements for your COM control:

1. It must enter information in the registry to let Media Center know it exists.  In C++, this can simply be a block of code added to the DllRegisterServer function.  In VB, you will have to make a .reg file for the user to run on their machine. (see the included samples for examples of this)
2. It must implement a function called Init(...) that Media Center will call when starting the plug-in to give you an object to control Media Center with. (the object is a dispatch pointer (CMJAutomation *))

Support

If you have questions or concerns not addressed by this SDK, or just have suggestions for making the SDK more understandable, please visit our developer's forum.