Using some upnp code I was able to emulate an extender to the point of having Vista pop up the Extender Found dialog.  I know it isn't much but thought I would share it with you all.  Here is a picture and the code is posted over at the softsled.net website...

Link to Code

 

Great!  I'll be watching your progress.  Let me know if you need a tester.

This is an excellent first step, good work :)

I believe there's a C# based opensource project laying around which is trying to emulate a host Media Center, so the 360 could be used to connect to a Linux host for example. I believe they've solved a large portion of the complex key exchange.

Edit:
I believe from my memory that the project was only to emulate an XP 2005 host, not a new Vista host. I have a good feeling that Microsoft may have changed the key exchange for the new Pika extenders.

Edit:
http://wikihost.org/wikis/mediacenter/wiki/start This guy has details some steps for the protocol exchange. Again I believe he's extracted the 2005 based exchange and thus may be subject to change with Vista.

http://www.tufour.org/
This is the C# based project for emulating a host for an Xbox 360. I believe they haven't completely finished the key exchange. Again, I believe it may be the 2005 exchange.

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Thanks for the heads up on this.  I do remember seeing this a while back.  i will take a look at the code and see if there is anything i can use.  Thanks again.

bigtall-

I am not a developer, but hopefully an encouraging word will help. The lack of Software Exteders has been my biggest complaint since I started with MCE.

Thanks for your efforts,

Rick

Posted some more information about the XBox 360 Extender in order to understand how the whole extender thing works.  If anyone has any information about this let me know.  I am still working through the whole back and forth communication in order to see what exactly happens when an extender is setup...

Link to Information

I'm slightly worried how the UI extending is implemented with Vista. Under 2005, the remoted experience was simply an RDP session to Media Centre which was running under GDI mode. However, I believe Microsoft has changed this for Vista.

I believe a Vista-connected Xbox 360 extender is able to enjoy the same full animations throughout navigation as with a directly connected VMC screen? I remember reading a blog post which explained how rendering of MCML is handled under Vista. Multiple renderers were created, DirextX, GDI and an Xbox 360 renderer. If this is so, is VMC simply rendering remotely to the Xbox 360 MCML renderer? I don't believe this could be totally correct as VMC add-ons, e.g. hosted IE web apps, work with the 360, suggesting that RDP sessions are still being used.

Do the new Pika extenders have the nice VMC transitions/animations? Or is it just the GDI experience which is presented when opening VMC under RDP? Can anyone determine that an RDP session is being created while a v2 extender is connected?

Edit: changed wording to clarify my question.

I can't follow exactly what you are saying, but if by transitions you meand the UI experience, in the Linksys2100 there is a definite "jerkiness" to the transitions. As if it is a very slow frame rate that the mind can't resolve!

Rick

By transitions I mean the nice animations which media centre does when you select something.  For example, selecting  "Videos" from the start page will cause the stock "zoom-in" animation.

Posted some more information about the communication between vista and the 360 extender during initial setup and key exchange.  Can be seen here...

http://softsled.net/node/44

I am running into a road block when trying to implement the UPnP communication for the extender.  That first communication is sending iterationsrequired as a ui1, basically a 8 bit unsigned integer.  Well in .NET, I belive this is a Byte.  So I set the parameter as being that but it is generating an error that says that object must be of type byte.  Not sure how I should get around that. 

Anybody have any ideas?

Here is my code for this...

UPnPStateVariable iterationSV = new UPnPModeratedStateVariable("A_ARG_TYPE_Iteration", typeof(Byte), false);

Convert.ToByte(false); ?

The problem is that this error is being handled all through the intel upnp dll.  I have tried to handle some events to try and capture the error before it replies but have not had any success.  I think I may try and decompile that code to see what is going on there.  If you want to all the code let me know and I will post it.

-jason

Success!  Sort of.  I have gotten past the error I was getting before and am able to generate a response to the request.  Of course I have no idea what to put in for the DeviceID, DeviceCertificate or DeviceConfirmAuthenticator. 

If anybody has any ideas on what kind of encryption they think might be used here I would love to here it.  You can see an example of a real communication here.