After giving us the 'fun with DVR-MS' article Microsofts Technical Editor for MSDN Magazine, Stephen Toub does it again and produces a new article about writing plug-ins for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition and again provides us with some sample code. This time he starts off by describing how to make a simple background plug-in, but caries on to where he describes how to make a 'position changer plug-in'. In the article Stephen's  says: "As a developer, when I find a perceived gap in a product's functionality, my first inclination is to ask whether I can write any code to fix it." and we at mcesoft think a whole lot of developers for Media Center feel the same way.

He continues with: "Personally, I think Media Center is a terrific system, but no system is perfect. After all, with millions of users, it's impossible to design a system that is perfection in the eyes of all of its users, as what's an ideal feature for one user is another user's frustration." and we think he hits the spot there.

The Media Center Development team did an excelent job on creating Media Center as it is today, but there will always be users out there that want to see some extended functionality and luckily Media Center is written in such a way it's open for development of plug-ins and enhancements by third party developers. In this new article Stephen gives developers once again insights how to develop functionality for Media Center, so if you are a developer of Media Center Plug-ins be sure to read this.

The plug-in provided with this article will add a 'jump to' functionality to your Media Center, here's what Stephen says about it: "Jumping to a specific time code is enabled while watching recorded TV shows (regardless of whether it's in Recorded TV or in My Videos), while listening to music, and while watching non-DVR-MS video, as long as that video supports seeking (so indexed WMV should work fine). While enjoying the media, hit the right-arrow button on the remote control and then enter a time on the number keys. If you then wait four seconds, it'll jump to the time you entered. To jump immediately, you can press the enter key. If the left arrow key is used instead of the right arrow key, the add-in will jump forward the amount of time entered (rather than to that time), or if you preface the time with a 0, the add-in will jump backwards that same amount"

The full article on Microsofts MSDN website: Time Travel with Windows XP Media Center

Stephen's previous article about the DVR-MS file format: Fun with DVR-MS