The Media Center Sandbox

Howdy,

Now i know this is not really the relevant section but it seems like the correct place to ask this question and hopefully get a response.

In short, how about an extender for a PC for media center, I'm creating all these wicked little widgets for media center why cant my gf running standard windows XP (or vista beta) connect to my machine with the tv cards and watch tv and use my widgets (or should i leave that to the bedroom?)? It would also make the task of checking add ins on an extender a lot easier as well.

-Marc

It would be nice to be able to do this, but I suspect there are political rather than technological reasons for not doing this.

In the meantime, to check if your app works on an extender without actually having one, you can get some way towards it by creating a limited user account on your Media Center box and try the app in there - if it doesn't run, it definitely won't work on an extender.

Cheers,
Andy

Mmm but the limited user context requires me to log off as the current user for the remote desktop computer to log in.

So its like tweak the program, get logged off while I test the program then log back in. Just isn't very helpful at all.

I honestly hope that vista will be able to connect to a central media center PC, I don't want to have to buy a TV card for this pc my partners pc and then fool around with antennas etc.

Anyone in the know have any idea about this?

-Marc

The answer is a very definite "no" for Vista - it's been reiterated a large number of times in the beta chats unfortunately - have a look at the beta chat transcripts on connect.microsoft.com.

You don't have to use a remote machine to test a limited user account - just set up a limited user account on your dev machine, and Alt-L or Ctrl-Alt-Del to switch to the login page without logging your existing user out. 

Cheers,
Andy