14 DAY TRIAL // Custom applications designed to extend the Windows Home Server Console or the Windows Home Server Platform should be referred to as Add-ins. Charlie Kindel, Product Unit Manager, Windows Server Incubation - Quattro, or Windows Home Server has delivered a collection of guidelines designed to enable developers to build Add-ins for the product. At the top of his list is the fact that Windows Home Server and Windows Server 2003 applications are interchangeable. In this respect, an Add-in for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 will also install and run on Windows Home Server.
In order to get the code to function on all three products, developers should pay extra attention to three areas, according to Kindel:
- Your installer. Check if you are running on Windows Home Server version information using GetVersionEx() and looking for VER_SUITE_WH_SERVER. Also understand the Add-in manager and craft MSI file that work with it. - Your code as a service. There's no desktop session you can run under on Windows Home Server. Your long running code must be installed as a service using the standard Windows service APIs (or it can run under the context of IIS of course). - Testing against Windows Home Server. There are differences in the Windows API between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003. They are relatively minor, but they do crop up and the best way to identify these is to make sure you do a full test pass.
According to Microsoft, there is nothing at this point that can possibly hold developers back from building add-ins for Windows Home Server. Not even the fact that the server is still in beta phase. In this respect, the Redmond Company has made available the Windows Home Server SDK at the beginning of April.
Although Microsoft does not deliver ideas for Windows Home Server Add-ins, it did point out that there is a major difference between building for the WHS Console and for the WHS Platform. As such, developers should focus on client-side UIs and not on integrating the UI in the console.
"The Home Server Console is designed to be an infrequently used application. It is intended to be used by one individual in the household for infrequent configuration tasks," Kindel added.