Thursday, May 20, 2004

Exposing WMP

Need to look into how to expose an instance of Windows Media Player running on the webserver to an ASP.NET web app. Not too sure whether the best route's going to be through a separate service or via a class within the web app. A separate component seems to make the best sense to me. I can expose it as a remoting object, running either in a little server app or in a full blown windows service. Which of those 2 is academic. Once the app is written to host the player, to develop that into a service isn't too difficult.

Need to read through the WMP SDK documentation, though. The only implementations I've seen of media player in an app is through a windows application (with incumbent UI elements). Having had a quick play last night, it seems that the WMP activeX control doesn't like being put onto a component design service. I'm sure I'll figure it out, though.

Once that's done, it's just the UI to do. Which should be fairly simple. I'm not planning anything spectacular. Just the ability to play songs or albums etc... Who knows where it'll go! But to quote Hannibal Lecter 'I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of fun!'

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