Article about how to use McmlPad during UI development

  • Article

Charlie Owen has posted an in-depth article over on the Media Center Sandbox site that I wanted to provide a link to here:

https://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/UserInterfaceDevelopmentWithTheMCMLPreviewToolMCMLPad.aspx

This article describes techniques for using the Media Center Markup Language Preview Tool (also known as McmlPad) during the MCML UI development process.  He discusses some of the key differences between how the standalone version of McmlPad behaves versus how the Media Center application host behaves (specifically - UI rendering, layout evaluation and page variables).

In addition, he uses the Z sample application to provide a nice example about how to create a UI test harness for an MCML application and configure settings in Visual Studio 2005 projects so they will launch McmlPad when pressing F5 in the Visual Studio IDE.

If you are developing a Windows Vista Media Center application using MCML, I encourage you to take a look at this article and download and try out the sample test harness Visual Studio project.