I’m working on a new Media Center application called MCEMailbox. MCEMailbox allows users to be notified of new emails, and view their inbox within the Media Center environment on Windows Vista.

It looks like OABSoftware beat me to the punch with their Vista Media Center Mail application, but I’ve been working on this application for a while now as a motivation to learn the new Media Center Markup Language (MCML). I plan on releasing a beta version in about a month or so, and I’ll be blogging about my progress here.

So far, I have really enjoyed working with MCML. I think it is a great addition to the current Media Center extensibility models, and look forward to the adoption of Windows Vista so that this platform has a larger potential user base. I have found some of the features of MCML to be downright awesome, and I have come across some limitations that I am still working through.

For now, I thought I’d share some screen shots of my progress so far.

MCEMailbox checks on a time interval for new messages in a POP3 account. When a new message arrives, the user is notified and given the option to view their inbox:




MCEMailbox can also be accessed from within the “Program Library”:




Opening MCEMailbox will show the user the contents of their inbox, with options to sort by Date, Subject, or Sender:




Selecting a message in the Inbox will take you to the “View Message” screen, where you can see the details of the message:




There is also a 10-foot configuration screen where you can configure the mail server settings:




And finally, an About screen:




That’s all for now. I still have a few hard issues to solve, which I’ll be working on in the next few weeks. In addition to releasing a beta version in the next month or so, I also plan to open-source this Media Center add-in. It will probably be hosted on CodePlex once the code is somewhat stable.