I haven’t interviewed any potential applicants yet, but I think a great interview question is: We have a slideshow feature in Media Center, however many times users would like to see their photos in random order. How do you randomize the display of their photos?
…The pictures developer just walked us through his proposed solution to the issue of, the first photo in a random slideshow is always the same.
Announcement: We’re creating an international partner directory for the Media Center website.
Why? There’s just too many of you for us to keep track of :). (For instance, Ben has 53 MCE plugins linked to on his page).
This directory will feature companies creating MCE applications, services or hardware. So to get listed visit www.mediacenterpartners.com, create an account and submit your details. The directory will launch in mid-October for us all to enjoy.
So I see via the Green Button that some of you have gotten hold of the Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2 bits. I also see that some of you are running into problems. I strongly recommend that you wait until it releases on Windows Update to ensure that you’re getting official Microsoft bits in the proper package with all the other required updates.
I’ve also read about a lot of your disappointment with the release but I don’t think that’s something I can discuss until after launch. Though I will say, that I have a new feature in there that I’m really excited about!
Also note that TweakMCE doesn’t work on it until we get a new version of TweakMCE released.
Thomas Hawk, Microsoft’s Charlie Owen Responds to My Media Center “Rant”
Part of the exchange is about when we are going to solve the problem of poor performance of music libraries:
While I can appreciate the secrecy and veil of product marketing that accompanies your process I see little harm in saying something like expect this to be fixed by x date.
Good news. Music performance has been significantly improved in Windows Vista Build 5219 (the PDC build). It wasn’t fixed earlier (i.e. Update Rollup 2) because we had major dependencies on Windows Media Player to fix the problem and our schedules did not align until the Windows Vista timeframe. Yes, we should have fixed it sooner, but Media Center is a very large software project requiring hundreds of people, has hundreds of dependencies on other components, and is working on a certain set schedule.