Michael Creasy's blog

According to AOL's stats , they've blocked almost a billion bits of spam today. That's a lot of spam. I've probably received between 30 to 40 spam messages today, all of which were blocked from hitting my inbox thanks to spamcop.net with no false positives...

Photo iPod Colour screen and everything. Hmm, tempting. Doesn't seem like there's anything else new other than the ability to display photos on it and on a TV by the looks of things. Still I can't say I'm not tempted with it. The 40Gb model would be a...

To try and make things easier for anyone looking to experiment with building add-ins for Media Center 2005 I've packaged up the add-in from my previous post on how to build an add-in (there was an error in the registration file I provided in the post...

HP have announced a new Media Center PC that would look right at home next to other home entertainment devices. The z500 series (link goes to PDF data sheet) supports dual tuners and most interestingly to me is compatible with the iPod (they say the Apple...

I posted an introduction to add-ins earlier this week using C#. I know there are lots of VB developers out there. If you'd like a sample using VB.NET post a comment here and I'll work something out over the weekend.

If you've got a Media Center PC and you want to upgrade to Media Center 2005 you need to contact the manufacturer of the PC to get the upgrade. HP have a page set up to order already here . I've heard that it's not as easy as it might be and I confess...

Ethan is a PM who works on Media Center and specifically on the extensibility platform that I also work on. You can expect to see a lot more from him soon. Here's his first post on the new version of the Media Center SDK .

It's not XP Pro either. Media Center should now be thought of as another version of XP just like Home and Pro. It's closer to Pro than Home, the major difference is that Media Center 2005 does not support connecting to a domain. The reason for this is...

If so you can order the upgrade to Media Center 2005 here . If you've got a different brand, check with the manufacturer to see how to get the upgrade.

How to build an Add-in for Windows Media Center Edition 2005 First, the basics... What is an Add-in? Add-ins are applications written in managed code (.NET Framework 1.0) that run inside Media Center. They have access to the Media Center API as well as...

I knew I'd forget a couple of things as there so many new features, here's what I missed: Messenger Media Center now has a built in version of Messenger. You can sign in on the Media Center PC or Extender and use Messenger from the comfort of your sofa...

Today (October 12th) is the day that Windows Media Center 2005 is launched. There's bound to be a lot of press about what's new in this version, but here's a summary of the highlights... Television HDTV support. Media Center now supports recording HDTV...

...in 80 minutes. I think you're going to like it...