I previously wrote a blog post describing a set of supplemental Windows Vista Media Center project templates for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that can be installed on a system that already has the Windows Vista Media Center SDK installed to give you some development options that are not currently available in the SDK.

I have updated this set of project templates to include the following changes from the initial package that I posted:

• Added a C# template for creating a Media Center background application and integrated it into both VS 2005 and VS 2008.  These are modeled after the steps that Charlie Owen listed in this blog post.
• Integrated the C# template that is included in version 5.2 of the Windows Vista Media Center SDK with VS 2008 (the SDK currently only integrates it with VS 2005)
• Renamed the templates so their purposes make more sense in the New Project dialog in the VS IDE (and added better icons courtesy of Charlie).  They are now named "Windows Media Center Application" (for the template based on the step-by-step guide) "Windows Media Center Application - Fundamental" (for the simpler template without as much pre-created code and MCML included) and "Windows Media Center Application - Background."
• Updated the installer to check for the existence of the Windows Vista Media Center SDK because some of the project templates require the McmlVerifier tool for a post-build step (and that tool is installed by the SDK)

The updated supplemental project template MSI is available at http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/mce_project_templates.zip.  If you install it on a system that had the previous version installed, it will automatically upgrade you to the new version.  In addition, this MSI is designed to co-exist side-by-side with the Media Center SDK, so installing and uninstalling either one will not harm the other.

I'm working with Charlie so that we can hopefully include some of these new templates in a future edition of the SDK as well.  If/when that happens, I'll make sure that side-by-side co-existence continues to work there too.