This is the third in a series.

• Part 0
• Part 1

Design

As with any good development effort, we begin by designing the solution, complete with an assessment of the pros and cons of each option. Of course, as with any good development effort, we begin with every intention of designing the solution, but we usually skip right past this to writing the code since designs are never any fun. Design: There is a server and there are 0 or more clients that want to control what the server spits out the sound card.

Right. With the design done, let's talk about implementation options:

As I see it, there are two options for implementing the functionality as exhaustively enumerated in Part 0 of our series: 1) A standalone application in which we host and automate a Windows Media Player control, 2) A plug-in to the existing standalone Windows Media Player in which we automate the instance of Windows Media Player in which we are hosted.

So, which of these approaches is better? I have no idea. So, we'll design the approach in such a way that the end user (client machine) doesn't care. How? SOA, WCF, and other TLA's. I figure I can hide my media playing component/service/application behind a WCF connection point. Then, if hosting the ActiveX control fails miserably or creating the WMP plug-in doesn't play nicely with .NET, then I'll always be able to call some arcane WIN32 function to dump directly to the sound card or convert to Linux, convert all of my WMA's to raw .au files and just cat [file.au] > /dev/audio.

Of course, that's an exaggeration. I'm sure one of the two approaches will work fine. I just don't know which. So, hiding the solution behind a WCF connection point should give me the flexibility to try both approaches without rewriting the clients.

At this point, I find that there are a couple of interesting questions to which I do not know the answer. This, of course, will not keep me from plunging headlong into the implementation. They're just questions.

• If I host an instance of the WMP ActiveX control, does it still do all of the clever background work of sniffing media information from the Internet, listening for changes in my media library, and downloading album art or is it just a numb playback machine using the existing media library?
• What are the multi-threading characteristics of the WMP library? Will I have to perform the read/write locks, or will WMP take care of that for me?