I get a  lot of question about how to develop applications for products like X-Box, Media Room and Windows Mobile. Some of these technologies have open developer platforms and some do not. There are also differences in the developer tools support. While most have support inside of Visual Studio others require specialized tools or have no tooling support at all. To help make it a little more clear I've created a quick overview of the all the Microsoft technologies and platforms that can be used to deliver multimedia applications.

Desktop and Browser -

The latest windows launch introduced Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is available for both Vista and Windows XP with the latest service pack. WPF allows you to create advanced user interfaces that combine fluid graphical elements with audio and video. WPF is also the default developer technology for creating applications for the newly launched Surface computing devices.

Silverlight is a light weight extension to WPF that is capable of running inside IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. It can also be used to create Vista sidebar gadgets as well. It allows you to create rich multimedia applications that run inside the browser.

Gaming -

XNA is the latest technology for creating both X-Box 360 and Windows games. On the X-Box XNA games are not for commercial distribution but XNA can be used for commercial Windows games. A XNA Professional Studio is planned to be released in the future for this. Today commercial X-Box games are developed via a SDK console that can be licensed from Microsoft.

Many customers ask how to build applications for the X-Box Marketplace. Currently there is no way to develop applications for the Marketplace and content is made available to customers via a licensing agreement between Microsoft and the content rights owner.

TV -

There are three active Microsoft products that in someway enhance the TV experience - Media Center, Media Room and HDI. Media Center is an extension of the Windows OS and is included in the Vista Home Premium and Ultimate SKUs. Anyone can create applications for Media Center using WPF, MCML or HTML however in order to have your applications displayed in the showcase area you need to enter into an agreement with Microsoft.

WPF applications run inside Media Center as an XBAP application the same way WPF apps can run inside of IE. The earliest version of Media Center allowed you to create applications  using HTML. This is still supported for backward compatibility. Both HTML and WPF applications will most likely be deprecated in future versions of MCE because both are limited in their ability to be streamed to extenders in the home. MCML (Media Center Markup Language) is the preferred way to create MCE applications because of it's native rendering support and extender support.

Media Room is Microsoft's IPTV product that is licensed and sold to Multiple Service Operators (MSO). The set top box technology supports applications through a new browser markup language as well as through RDP (remote desktop protocol). RDP allows you to use almost any windows development technology to create applications that can be displayed on the TV but is limited in it's ability to show media elements (audio and video) inside the applications. Recent changes have been made to the browser markup language that make it more like MCML. I'll post more details when they become available.

HDI is the interactive programming platform for HD-DVD. It's ease of use and similarity to other Microsoft development platforms is a major differentiator between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. It's based on standard .Net tools and languages.

Mobile -

There are two ways of developing mobile applications. For Windows Mobile you can develop applications the same way you do for any windows application using any of the .Net specific technologies except you target it toward the feature set of the compact framework. For non windows based mobile devices you can use ASP.net to create WAP applications that can be viewed inside the phone's browser. WAP applications will be limited to the type of multimedia elements that you can present. It's interesting to note that many mobile devices both windows and non-windows based have built in VC-1 decoders so Windows Media is supported across many of the mobile platforms.

Media Device -

The Zune is Microsoft's all purpose media device. It currently does not have an open framework for developing custom applications. All content that is made available in the Zune Marketplace is done so through a licensing agreement between Microsoft and the rights holder.

Other Resources -

Check out my resources page for more information and support