Customizing the UI Plug-in

[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

At this point, your project is ready for customization. You can modify the wizard-generated implementation of the IWMPPluginUI interface, you can add a user interface to the CPluginWindow class, and you can implement a property page in the CPropertyDialog class. If your plug-in is configured to listen to Windows Media Player events, the wizard will have generated default or empty implementations of all the necessary event handlers, which you also modify or create.

The type of plug-in and the features it supports are indicated by a value which is stored in the Windows registry. The wizard generates a file with a .rgs file name extension that contains the information to register the plug-in with. The "Capabilities" value in this file is the decimal equivalent of a Boolean OR of the plug-in type constants and plug-in flags defined in wmpplug.h. Although this value is determined by the options you select in the wizard, you must modify it if you want to create a plug-in with multiple presets or one that media items or playlists can be sent to.

As you modify and extend your plug-in code, you can build and register your DLL so that you can test your plug-in in Windows Media Player.

Building a UI Plug-in