Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I have released my Media Center Front Display Panel SDK. You can find API documentation here.
This is an SDK that I created to give you a managed API and State Aggregator to get notified of state from the Media Center State Aggregator Service. If you have a Windows Media Center 2004 machine you can implement IFrontPanelDisplay and do what you want with the information. In other words, if you want to write some code that gets notified of things like current tv show, elapsed time, volume level and so on then this is for you.
For example, Ian Kennedy (a fellow MSFT employee) wrote a C# implementation for the Hitachi HD44780 Parallel Port Vacuum Fluorescent Display that comes with our D.VINE Media Center cases. I wrote an implementation for my machine using his code and voilà. If you happen to have a Media Center box with such a VFD you can feel free to download it.