The Media Center Sandbox

I just upgraded to Windows 7 and was fooling around with the different WMC SDK's. Is there a blog/whitepaper/comparison chart explaining the contents and compatibilities of the different versions of WMC SDK? From what I understand 5.3 is Vista and 7 compatible whereas 6.0 is only Windows 7 compatible, is that correct? Also I noticed that 5.3 creates a VS 2005 template whereas 6.0 does not. Are you guys uninstalling 5.3 before installing 6.0 or does it matter?

5.3:
Overview
The Windows Media Center Software Development Kit is designed to help developers create applications and software components that take advantage of features provided by Windows Media Center.

This release includes documentation, tools, sample code and Visual Studio 2005 project templates for the following Windows Media Center platform models:

Windows Media Center Presentation Layer Application (Local, Background and Web)
Hosted HTML

6.0:
Overview
This release includes documentation, tools, sample code The Windows Media Center SDK is designed to help developers create applications and software components that take advantage of features provided by Windows Media Center, and documents programming technologies that you can use to extend the capabilities of Windows Media Center.

If you want to develop apps which run on both Windows Vista and Windows 7 you should use 5.3. Templates *should* work for both VS 2005 and 2008.

If you want to develop apps for Windows 7 you should use 6.0. Templates are only available for VS 2008. Development should occur on Windows Vista with testing on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Generally speaking you should install 5.3 prior to 6.0 on a Windows 7 machine -- but should not your mileage may vary -- we never did a ton of testing for this scenario.

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Charlie Owen (Microsoft)

Hi Chalrie thanks for the reply.

Just to clarify regarding one thing you said about 6.0: "Development should occur on Windows Vista with testing on Windows Vista and Windows 7."

Did you mean to say Development with 5.3 should occur on Windows Vista with testing on Windows Vista and Windows 7?