About Partnerships
[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]
A partnership is a special relationship between a portable device and Windows Media Player. Users can establish a partnership for a particular device by using the Windows Media Player user interface. You can programmatically manage partnerships by using IWMPSyncDevice::createPartnership and IWMPSyncDevice::deletePartnership. The createPartnership method starts an asynchronous process that ends when the CreatePartnershipComplete event is received through the IWMPEvents2 interface.
Windows Media Player 10 or later supports creating partnerships with up to 16 devices. Each partnership has an associated partnership index. You can retrieve the partnership index for a particular device by calling IWMPSyncDevice::get_partnershipIndex. Partnership indices are numbered from 1 to 16. When a particular device does not have a partnership with Windows Media Player, getPartnershipIndex returns zero for the index.
You can retrieve the partnership status of a particular device by calling IWMPSyncDevice::get_status and then inspecting the WMPDeviceStatus value retrieved. Windows Media Player allows one partnership with one user's library on one computer for each device. This means that creating a new partnership destroys any existing partnership the current device might have with another computer. To know when the status changes for a device, you can receive the DeviceStatusChange event.
Windows Media Player cannot create a partnership with a device having the status wmpdsManualDevice.
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