The Media Center Sandbox

I need to test that VideoBrowser functions allright with Fiji installed. And the only place that seems to be providing a download is torrent sites.

If you are a commercial developer/ISV (i.e. run/work in a business that develops software for sale) then you should be able to get it through your local Microsoft subsidiary contact.

If you are a hobbyist developer, unfortunately there's no way I know of for you to get hold of it, without resorting to torrent download, as it's not available for "general public" release.

Cheers,
Andrew

its the same sad truth as in much of software, first you buy then you borrow...

i swear ms has like 2 programmers on the mce team...

Actually, we are up to three now. The horde of monkeys banging on the keyboards in the back office for payment of bananas is paying off dividends, finally.

I hope you took that as a joke that it was intended to be.  Honestly though, will the amount of work that seems to be in the tv pack and the span of time since the last "update" which from a user point of view was the release of vista the ehome team must be quite small.

 

Btw, I have a question about internal ehome development.  Do you do unit testing?  I ask because without some crazy mock object I'm finding it hard to unit test anything that touches the UI or Hosting namespaces.  I'm hoping that if you all do unit testing you can give me some pointer on how to easily mock these?  Like the AddinHost object or the Application object?

Translucent - if you have a look at the code, you'll see what the eHome team have been spending their time on - there are a lot of significant and fundamental changes to the application.   Also, I'd imagine that the eHome team were working on several code branches at the same time, not just all dedicated to Fiji.

 

I don't think Charlie was joking...

AndyC:

Translucent - if you have a look at the code, you'll see what the eHome team have been spending their time on - there are a lot of significant and fundamental changes to the application.   Also, I'd imagine that the eHome team were working on several code branches at the same time, not just all dedicated to Fiji.

 

 

Oh I'm not saying they didn't do a fair amount of work, they clearly did, and I've read online (somewhere?) about at least 1 custom project they spent a fair amount of time on... showtime I think?  Side note, I run a development team of 4 full time programmers, 30+ support staff and a bunch of upper management types.  Our development is all done paired and backed by both heavy unit testing and a good sized QA team.  That being the case we push through quite a bit of code in a variety of areas (web, soap, large scale data processing, all with realtime reporting).  Our customers are the companies everyone pays whenever they watch a movie so I do have some direct knowledge of project stresses and unrealistic deadlines (you try fielding call at 4am from angry execs from major film companies).  I wasn't trying to say they didn't do alot of work, only that the team must by really quite small considering the scale of work they output on the timelines they appear to be running.

 

It was simply meant as a friendly jab, I love the vmc project, for all the complaining that myself or anyone else does, vmc is easily the best development env. for anyone wanting to get into this type of development at a hobby level.

 

Cheers all around

AndyC,

Thanks... was hoping for a more positive answer, but I guess Charlie's lack of answer kind of summarizes the situation... "Stop complaining fools, when we are ready to give you something we will release it, until then just deal with it. I don't see why you would even want to support people who download unreleased bits of our software using bittorrent. We have no public release date. We are still trying to iron out bugs with this release" 

I hope the next version of MCML has an object framework that maps 1 to 1 to the MCML xml objects.
I know .... it's a CRAZY idea, I mean why would anyone ever want to use objects if they have perfectly usable chunks of crazy super verbose XML. 

Cheers
Sam
 

Sam,  there are a number of bugs that will keep your plugin from behaving as expected, I'd stick with officially not supporting it, Im pretty sure that is what we are going to be doing.

Which seems to be the way many apps are going.

It's a shame really, considering the benefits that TV Pack to some people. I'd be very disappointed if I purchased an OEM machine with TV Pack only to find out that the swish TV archiving/Movie applications don't work on my machine.

Then you'd need to be disappointed with the OEM who chose to install the TV Pack and break all those apps.  They don't have to install it, but they've chosen to do so despite knowing that it breaks the swish TV archiving/Movie apps.   If an OEM doesn't offer both, then they are very definitely not catering for the "enthusiast" market, but are focusing on those customers who will not install anything else on their Media Center system.

Cheers,
Andrew

Whilst what you are saying is true, I would also argue that it is indeed the "enthusiasts" that would want/benefit most from the extra features included in TV-Pack.

Oh well, here's hoping MS will either fix the current bugs (ha) or give us a foolproof workaround for them (haha). Here, have a banana [:@]

emigrating:

Whilst what you are saying is true, I would also argue that it is indeed the "enthusiasts" that would want/benefit most from the extra features included in TV-Pack.

Oh well, here's hoping MS will either fix the current bugs (ha) or give us a foolproof workaround for them (haha). Here, have a banana [:@]

There are indeed some great feature in TV Pack, personally I find the #1 feature by FAR to me (a directv subscriber) is the ability to "right-click/more info/0" a channel in the guide and select "Hide Channel".  I get really tired of the directv feed constantly adding channels that I don't get and would never watch even if I did.  Add in the unreal speed increase when saving changes to your channel guide are just fantastic!  I really do hope some bug fixes come down the pike soon-ish (read prior to win7).

If some of the large bugs (try opening ANY plugin... leave it on for more then 1 hour and the come back and try to exit it... no go.  I'm not sure if this is the known missing MediaExperience bug or not but it sucks!) can be patched then I'm sure many of the plugins available today would be more then happy to update their installers to support the tv pack.

AndyC:

Then you'd need to be disappointed with the OEM who chose to install the TV Pack and break all those apps.  They don't have to install it, but they've chosen to do so despite knowing that it breaks the swish TV archiving/Movie apps.   If an OEM doesn't offer both, then they are very definitely not catering for the "enthusiast" market, but are focusing on those customers who will not install anything else on their Media Center system.

Cheers,
Andrew

I'd imagine that the enthusiast would know what they were doing if they did purchase. I'm not talking about the enthusiast who can make an informed decision, but the guy who just walks off the street and purchases (you know those people who go to a major electronics chain to buy their PC).

They won't know the limitations of the software they're buying. If they get the TV Pack version, and want to install this stuff at a later date? Well, the can't without some major issues.

In addition, the TV Pack does add some significant new features for certain markets (being in Oz, we aren't one of them). So it comes down to weighing up whether those new features are worth more to you than a third party application. We've already seen an example of a third party developer losing a partnership with a System Builder for this exact reason.

I think the fact remains that the TV Pack has shipped with a significant bug, and that has yet to be addressed. When you have people commercially developing for your platform, to your publicly released API, and an update breaks it, that is unforgiveable.