Playing a MP3 in c++ using plain Windows API

While playing a mp3 is quite common in a demo, I have seen that most demo are often using 3rd party dlls like Bass or FMod to perform this simple task under windows. But if we want to get rid off this dependency, how can we achieve this with a plain windows API? What's the requirements to have a practical MP3Player for a demo?

Surprisingly, I was not able to find a simple code sample other the Internet that explain how to play a mp3 with Windows API, without using the too simple Windows Media Player API. Why WMP is not enough (not even talking about MCI - Media Control Interface which is even more basic than WMP)?

Well, It's lacking one important feature : It's only able to play from an url, so it's not possible for example to pack the song in an archive and play it from a memory location (although not a huge deal if you want to release the song on the side of your demo). Also I have never tested the timing returned by WMP (using probably IWMPControls3 getPositionTimeCode) and not really sure It's able to provide a reliable sync (at least, If you intend to use sync... but hey, is a demo without any sync, can be still called a demo?:)

NShader 1.1, hlsl, glsl, cg syntax coloring for Visual Studio 2008 & 2010

I have recently released NShader 1.1 which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 as well as bugfixes for hlsl/glsl syntax highlighting.

While this plugin is quite cool to add a basic syntax highlighting for shader languages, It lacks intellisense/completion/error markers to improve the editor experience. I didn't have time to add such a functionality in this release as... I don't really have too much time dedicated to this project... and well, I have so much to learn from effectively practicing a lot more shader languages that I'm fine with this basic syntax highlighting! ;) Is it a huge task to add intellisense? It depends, but concretely, I need to implement for each shading language a full grammar/lexer parser in order to provide a reliable intellisense. Of course, a very basic intellisense would be feasible without this, but I would rather not to use an annoying/unreliable intellisense popup.