Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 05.06.2011

Last week, I mentioned that we'll be working on bringing the new learning path design to the Accessibility and Audio/Video content.  Unfortunately, this has ended up being more work that we expected so it will be delayed a little bit.  On the plus side, the work has started and I'll proudly recommend the following technologies as the latest for Audio/Video:

  • Get Started with Media Foundation - Latest and greatest multimedia APIs. 
  • Get Started with Core Audio - Latest and greatest Audio APIs.  If you are building a digital audio workstation for Windows, do your customers a favor and support this :)
  • Get Started with DirectShow - A slightly older API (introduced in Windows 95) that is still hardware accellerated and enables encoding, capture, and rendering of multimedia content.  If you can't use Media Foundation, this is the way you do it.

These will be integrated into the learning path for Audio/Video that I'm currently working on refreshing.

This is a really short update, I have been hammered with meetings all day but before I close this one out, I would like to also propose a new blog post format, "Use this not this."  The first example I can think of would be "Use Direct2D not GDI" and I would do things like highlight which is our latest offering and the scenarios where it'd best be applied. The articles would be focused to which technologies are new in Windows starting with Vista and I would try to get recommendations from product teams for the most relevant exmaples and code.  Let me know what you think in the comments!

Also, once we get Learn: Windows Accessibility for Developers and Learn: Audio/Video Programming for Windows done, it's on to fixing all of the links in the top level pages so that the best developer center content is all you can browse to!

See Also