Thursday, June 9, 2005
The Power and Perils of a Platform
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
I have a Windows Media Center Edition 2005 computer, and I've been experimenting with some of the plugins that the MCE community has made available. That's the power of the platform: extensibility by third party developers. This is something that Tivo can't touch. There are all sorts of great plugins available, including eBay plugins, video compression plugins, Netflicks plugins, call display plugins, and many others. You can take your MCE computer, and by installing several plugins, get drastically enhanced functionality from it. That's what Microsoft does best: build platforms, and they have an army of developers behind them who are eagerly waiting to developer the next "big thing" for the platform. My MCE can do 10x more than my ReplayTV could...but my ReplayTV never got so unstable it was unusable, and my MCE has.
The perils of a platform? Instability and problems, often caused by those same third party developers (though sometimes it's Microsoft's fault). They mean well - no developer purposefully creates code to wreak havoc on a computer (except for the virus writers of course), but sometimes it can happen anyway.
A couple of months ago I installed a plugin that shall remain nameless (the point here isn't to blame the developer). This plugin was still in beta, so I knew I was taking a risk installing it - but I wanted the features so badly! The plugin installed, and it worked great. A new beta was released, but when I tried to install it I was informed I needed to uninstall the old one. I tried to do so, but at some midway point the process gave me an error and failed. I rebooted and tried again, but it wouldn't budge. Worse yet, the plugin stopped working, which was frustrating because I found it very useful. I emailed the developer, got a response, replied back with some log file information, and then didn't hear back from him again. But hey, it's a free plugin, so I wasn't expecting stellar support.
After about a month of having a broken MCE, I decided to get ugly: I started manually hacking it out of my system by deleting the program folder, associated DLLs, and removing any references to it from the registry. For a while there it was touch and go, because the MCE interface would crash at every load. After some more hacking it seemed to stabilize, but I was dismayed that there wasn't some sort of self-healing routine if the MCE interface realized that it was broken. Windows Media Player 10 will disable plugins that cause it to crash, so why can't MCE 2005?
After some swearing and rebooting, I got it cleaned out. Then I installed the latest version, because I just had to have it. Am I a junkie geek or what? :roll: The plugin is mostly working again - it runs in the background when it's supposed to run, but I no longer have access to it from within MCE, which defeats half the purpose of it. I'm wary of touching it because I don't want to have my MCE go into a spiral of death again. Recently I managed to do a repair of the MSI install, and things seem to be back to normal...but I'm wary about touching future plugins again unless I know they're stable. I almost need a second MCE just for testing purposes. I supposed I could always install Virtual PC for testing purposes. I don't think I should have to do that though - in order for Microsoft to make inroads in the TV room, stability needs to be the number one priority.
UPDATE: Well, silly me, I should have done a bit more research on Tivo before writing this. James has pointed out that Tivo has a Java-based architecture and an SDK for developers to look at. I wonder if a Tivo loaded up with 3rd party plugins has the potential for the same stability problems I've seen with my MCE? I'd guess so - that's the price of extensibility.
The perils of a platform? Instability and problems, often caused by those same third party developers (though sometimes it's Microsoft's fault). They mean well - no developer purposefully creates code to wreak havoc on a computer (except for the virus writers of course), but sometimes it can happen anyway.
A couple of months ago I installed a plugin that shall remain nameless (the point here isn't to blame the developer). This plugin was still in beta, so I knew I was taking a risk installing it - but I wanted the features so badly! The plugin installed, and it worked great. A new beta was released, but when I tried to install it I was informed I needed to uninstall the old one. I tried to do so, but at some midway point the process gave me an error and failed. I rebooted and tried again, but it wouldn't budge. Worse yet, the plugin stopped working, which was frustrating because I found it very useful. I emailed the developer, got a response, replied back with some log file information, and then didn't hear back from him again. But hey, it's a free plugin, so I wasn't expecting stellar support.
After about a month of having a broken MCE, I decided to get ugly: I started manually hacking it out of my system by deleting the program folder, associated DLLs, and removing any references to it from the registry. For a while there it was touch and go, because the MCE interface would crash at every load. After some more hacking it seemed to stabilize, but I was dismayed that there wasn't some sort of self-healing routine if the MCE interface realized that it was broken. Windows Media Player 10 will disable plugins that cause it to crash, so why can't MCE 2005?
After some swearing and rebooting, I got it cleaned out. Then I installed the latest version, because I just had to have it. Am I a junkie geek or what? :roll: The plugin is mostly working again - it runs in the background when it's supposed to run, but I no longer have access to it from within MCE, which defeats half the purpose of it. I'm wary of touching it because I don't want to have my MCE go into a spiral of death again. Recently I managed to do a repair of the MSI install, and things seem to be back to normal...but I'm wary about touching future plugins again unless I know they're stable. I almost need a second MCE just for testing purposes. I supposed I could always install Virtual PC for testing purposes. I don't think I should have to do that though - in order for Microsoft to make inroads in the TV room, stability needs to be the number one priority.
UPDATE: Well, silly me, I should have done a bit more research on Tivo before writing this. James has pointed out that Tivo has a Java-based architecture and an SDK for developers to look at. I wonder if a Tivo loaded up with 3rd party plugins has the potential for the same stability problems I've seen with my MCE? I'd guess so - that's the price of extensibility.
