Well today I wrote a new Add-In for VISTA Media Center, its mostly re-use of Stephen Toub's Position Changer (Time Travel) Add-In as it had all keyboard hook logic written already but the idea is that there are some add-ins that are such a large part of your Media Center experience that you want to be able to get to them at the push of a button like the other content portals in Media Center.
For me that Add-In is My Movies, the best way to accomplish this would be to have a single IR code that a remote could send that Media Center would bubble up to a background add-in that would in-turn invoke the add-in you selected.
Problem is that although I have a programmable remote (I use a Logitech Harmony 890 downstairs) I do not see how one can listen for arbitrary infrared commands (IR), it very well might be possible but its not something I was able to figure out in the couple hours I allocated to this.
That left me with having a sequence of keys, that was non-ambiguous so it wouldn't accidentally get invoked, that was as short as possible so its was less likely to fail, and didn't result in a loss of capability inside of media center because of my use of the related IR codes.
That's a pretty tall order given the limited number of IR codes that are mapped to keyboard events, but I ended up with something that appears to work well.
The background add-in listens for "*{a number sequence}#", when a specific number sequence is hit it looks at its configuration to see which add-in to invoke for that sequence.
NOTE: * maps to the Print screen key, and I think (although I am not positive) that has been disabled within Media Center anyways and the # maps to the End key which I hope is not used by anyone while navigating the 10 foot experience (who knows!).
I actually didn't quite finish it, don't get me wrong it works now pretty reliably its just that it needs to be finished off with some configuration so that it can be used for add-ins other than My Movies, and before I release it broadly I will probably have to add a small configuration applet but its late, tomorrow I have to do my review, and this week I have to do a bunch of work to get a fence put up so it will probably take me a weekend or two to get to this.
If your interested in this in the mean time (as a My Movies ONLY add-in) let me know, for it to be useful you will need a programmable remote that allows you to send macros like I described above.
Let me know.