Earlier today, I received the following email:

Dear Anthony,

thank you so much for such a great summary of the numerous tasks one has to do in order to register the application in Media Center.

I have, however, one question:
How do you actually construct the “AddIn” String which is in your case “AnthonyPark.MediaCenter.MCML.MCMLHelloWorld_Start, MCMLHelloWorld, Version=1.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=091b5809569f1055, processorArchitecture=MSIL”?

What exactly are the two first attributes and how can I find them out?

Thanks a lot,
Xxxx

The summary that this person is referring to is a blog post that I wrote back in October titled: “Creating an MCML Application for Windows Vista Media Center“

For me, specifying the strong assembly name for the AddIn for the registration process was always one of the more tricky parts of developing an AddIn for Media Center. Almost every time I had a problem, it was related to this step in some way.

The “AddIn” string value used when registering a Media Center AddIn contains the information that Media Center needs to launch your AddIn. In the case of my example, the string looks like this:

AnthonyPark.MediaCenter.MCML.MCMLHelloWorld_Start, MCMLHelloWorld, Version=1.0.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=091b5809569f1055, processorArchitecture=MSIL

This is what is known as the “strong name” of your assembly. To construct this name, use the following formula:

FQCN + “, ” + SASN

Where:
- FQCN is the Fully Qualified Class Name of the class that implements IAddInEntryPoint (the class that Media Center is supposed to launch). In my case, it is AnthonyPark.MediaCenter.MCML.MCMLHelloWorld_Start (which is the namespace that my class is in, plus the class name).

- SASN is the Strong Assembly Name of your assembly. The easiest way that I have found to determine this is to install your assembly into the GAC using the GACUtil, and then use GACUtil -L to list your assembly:

Hope this helps with your Media Center development! I also updated my previous post to contain this additional information.

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tags: Media Center, MCML, MVP