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I started working on WMC 2.0 in the fall of 2004 just as it was coming together as a project.  WMC v1 had just been shipped and we were trying to figure out what the v2 would look like.  Over the course of the next year I spent most of my time on WMC v2 with the remainder largely on the Vista version of the same product. 

During that time I also started working in the internet community that had begun using version 1.  It stated as a few posts on  the microsoft.public.windowmedia.devices newsgroup.  Over the course of a few months it went from nothing to several posts a day.  It was very exciting to work directly with the end-users of the product, and I was hooked. Newsgroups are great, but I just don’t think they are accessible for most people. To grow the community more we needed web forums.  Diane, one of the Digital Media MVP’s stepped up to the plate and launched https://wmcplayer.com and its associated web forums.  So far, this forum probably contains the most detailed technical information about WMC anywhere.  Right now there are still well under 1000 total posts on the forum, so a determined read might still be able to read everything.More recently, I started posting on the forums at https://www.xbox.com.  With the thousands and thousands of Xbox 360’s out there the hardware base for WMC has just exploded, and with it the number of people who are depending on the community to help them figure WMC out.

I find now that after doing this for nearly a year and a half I’m beginning to post the same stuff over and over.  I’ve got quite a little list of my favorite posts.  The problem I see there is that once you find one of my little posts, you can’t really find the next one.  It may be on the newsgroup, or the web-forum, or the Xbox forums.  I’m hoping that by doing a bit of blogging that I can collect all of my hard-earned knowledge in a one place and make it easier to find (and easier to refer to).

Regards,

Alan Ludwig
Lead Software Development Engineer
Verifier Technologies
Windows Core Test Engineering and Tools
Microsoft