User Interface Plug-ins Programming Guide

[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

The two code samples described in this section demonstrate the process of implementing a custom user interface (UI) plug-in starting with code generated by the Windows Media Player Plug-in Wizard.

The Search UI plug-in is a metadata area plug-in that provides a Search button. When this button is clicked, a search page is launched in the default Web browser that contains information about the artist of the current media item.

The first step in creating this plug-in is to start a new project in Microsoft Visual C++ by selecting Windows Media Player Plug-in Wizard from the Projects tab. Name the project "Search", and click OK. Choose UI Plug-in and click Next. Then choose the Metadata type from the options list and click Next. Finally, click the check box for auto-run support so that the plug-in will load automatically, and then click Finish. The wizard generates the required project files, including basic implementations of the CSearch class and the IWMPPluginUI interface that it supports, and the CPluginWindow class that provides the UI. This is the code that will be modified to provide the plug-in functionality described in this section.

The last topic in this section describes how to create a background UI plug-in for Windows Media Player 10 Mobile. This plug-in uses modified code generated from the Windows Media Player Plug-in Wizard to create a plug-in for Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

This section contains the following topics.