Creating a Visualisation in Visual Studio 2008 (Part 1)

December 2nd, 2008

I vaguely remember trying out something a long time ago with an old SDK and an old educational version of Visual Studio (obtained from university in the first year). There was a sample visualisation in C++ that could be immediately tested out in Windows Media Player.

But this was a long time ago and the files have been lost under several OS reinstalls and the voluminous expansion of accumulated stuff. Instead I would have to start anew with recent SDKs and the new Visual Studio 2008 for my Programming for Digital Media module. But because this wasn’t straightforward, and the number of circles I’ve had to run in will prove tedious to recount, I’ve decided to simply post what you DO need to do to get this to work.

The Method (sans crap)

• Download the full new Windows SDK (the standalone Windows Media Player SDK will not help you…) Google it to find this huge installer.
• Follow the instructions on MSDN for installing the Plugin Wizard into Visual Studio in general (not 2008) found on this MSDN page.
  To summarise, this basically involves copying the three Windows Media Player Plugin wizard files from the SDK (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\Multimedia\WMP_11\wizards\VSNET) into the visual studio directory(C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcprojects) – my installations were probably the default locations.
  Choose the 2005 one but rename it to wmpwiz.vsz once it’s copied
• Then you open the file with Notepad and change it to look like this:
  VSWIZARD 7.0
Wizard=VsWizard.VsWizardEngine.9.0
Param="WIZARD_NAME = Windows Media Player Plug-in Wizard"
Param="ABSOLUTE_PATH = C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\Multimedia\WMP_11\wizards\VSNET"
Param="FALLBACK_LCID = 1033"
Param="VS2003 = 1"
  The original solution can be found here.