New Episode! The .NET Show: Windows XP Media Center Edition

The .NET Show: Windows XP Media Center Edition
https://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/episode.aspx?xml=theshow/en/episode053/manifest.xml)

The computer is in the midst of an important transition. The time was, when it was  "just" a computer, that hunk of metal on your desk that you used for writing documents, playing games, or programming on (until the wee hours of the morning). Lately, we've seen the computer move off of the desktop and into your phones, cars, and even watches. They are doing more then just becoming an "appliance" like a toaster, but are showing how they can deeply integrate their services and capabilities into various parts of our lives.

Windows XP Media Center Edition (or just MCE for short), is an illustration of one way that the rich feature set of the computer can almost invisibly provide us with a new level of data integration by turning itself into a rich media component of our A/V system.

In this episode of The .NET Show, my guests discuss the role that MCE plays in the home, and how it can help change the way people interact with their various media services today. John Canning and Charlie Owen provide details about the broad range of potential customers for MCE, and how different partners can integrate specific experiences within the MCE environment. Then Michael Creasy joins Charlie Owen to show some actual coding, and illustrate how easy it is for an MCE application to re-purpose many of the media services within specialized applications.

Sure, this isn't quite the same thing as running your toaster at 3ghz, but providing such a seamless experience for your home media usage is a pretty compelling illustration of where computers are going.

Thanks
-Robert Hess

NOTE: At the end of this episode we mention that the next episode will be on IE7... timeing constraints are going to force us to push that episode off for a while. The next episode will be one that we film down at the PDC. See you there!