Defining a UI

The main purpose of MCML is to create a user interface (UI) for a Windows Media Center application. This process can be broken down by creating the UI components—the building blocks—of a more complex UI. Each UI component is self-contained; it can be as simple as a button or as complex as a top-level form. You can combine and reuse different UI components as needed.

The root element of an MCML document is Mcml. Within this element, each UI component is defined using the UI element. If an MCML document contains multiple UI elements, the first one in the document is displayed. A UI element must always be named, and it contains four important attributes: Content, Properties, Locals, and Rules.

You cannot display an MCML UI over a Windows Media Center experience, but you can display a dialog box or notification.

This section contains the following topics:

Topic Description
Defining the Content of a UI Describes the Content attribute of a UI.
Setting UI Properties Describes the Properties attribute of a UI, and how these properties can be set.
Setting UI Locals Describes the Locals attribute of a UI, and how these values are used.
Working with Resource Groups Describes how applications can request XML data from web services to create resource groups for a UI.
Inheriting from a Base UI Describes how you can use inheritance to reuse the state and behavior of a base UI.

See Also