Extending the Windows Mobility Center with third party tiles

Long Zheng has an interesting post about extending Mobility Center, which, incidentally, should be available to desktop users: Vikram Madan, a Microsoft employee, pointed out the WMC was purposely restricted to discourage third-party developers from building these tiles. Instead, the ability to build and distribute tiles is a luxury only to original equipment manufacturers like Lenovo who does in fact make available some of their own tiles, but they’re not very useful. last week I challenged Rafael Rivera Jr. (who recently patched Yahoo’s Messenger for Windows Vista to work on X64 amongst patching many other things) to find a way to build third-party tiles for the Mobility Center. As a sample implementation, I wanted him to realize the “Turn off display” functionality I so desperately wanted. Today, Rafael is not only releasing the first non-OEM tile for the Windows Mobility Center but is also showing how other developers can as well. As it turns out, it’s not impossible, just Microsoft’s tried very hard not to reveal how it is done. This is excellent stuff.