Have YOU Updated Your Windows SDK Recently?

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win-SDK_rgbIt can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another.

One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK, focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and  Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip).

After installing the Windows SDK, you'll want to do two things:

  • Run the new Windows SDK Configuration Tool (Start / Programs / Windows SDK v6.1 / Visual Studio Registration) to ensure that this is set as the default help collection in Visual Studio
  • Follow this workaround to fix a XAML Intellisense bug that will be very irritating if you're a WPF developer.

For more information on the Windows SDK, check out the team's blog or visit the recently overhauled Windows Vista development center on MSDN.