One of the things that excites me about Media Center is it's extensibility - there is so much more that can be done with Media Center than just the built-in features, and there are a lot of very clever people out there producing add-ins to extend the functionality in all sorts of different and really inventive ways.
The biggest issue with all this - where do I find these add-ins? There are a few well known ones such as My Movies, but for the rest of the Media Center development community, getting in front of an interested audience can be very hit and miss. So, Ian Dixon and I have put together a new website and Media Center add-in to fix this! It's called madeformediacenter.com and is a central repository for Media Center add-ins and related apps. Developers can submit their add-ins to the site, and once activated they will appear in both the website and the madeformediacenter.com add-in.
You can find more details of this new service including screenshots here:
http://iandixon.co.uk/cs/blogs/ian/archive/2009/11/17/introducing-madeformediacenter-the-app-store-for-windows-media-center.aspx and you can create an account by logging on to the website here:
http://madeformediacenter.com
Once your account is set up, to publish your addin or app, click on "Publish App"!
Please let us have feedback on whether you think this is a good idea, and any suggestions for improvements or changes.
This is very much a version 1.0 - no bells and whistles yet, as we want to gauge interest before spending a serious amount of time developing it further. At the moment there is no payment infrastructure, so only free apps, or ones that can support their own payment infrastructure outside of the add-in are possible, but if there is enough demand we will implement it.
Cheers,
Andrew