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Microsoft Windows SDK

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Microsoft Platform SDK is a free package available from Microsoft which contains all header files, libraries and tools required to develop Microsoft Windows applications. The package also contains documentation and samples.

It includes a console kernel mode debugger (KD), 2 user mode console debuggers (NTSD and CDB) , and a GUI front-end for them (WinDbg), along with all the standard header files and libraries necessary for developing software for the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. It does not include any elaborate GUI tools like the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, or any object-oriented window-library like the Microsoft Foundation Classes. Hence it is very difficult to produce high functionality applications like GUI Office suites using just the SDK. To address this long-standing concern, Microsoft released an Express Edition of their C++ development environment, Visual C++.

64-bit

Before the release of Visual C++ 2005, the Platform SDK was the only source of the Visual C++ 64-bit compilers.

Itanium

Starting at the Feb 2003 release of the Platform SDK, it contains the Visual C++ 6.0 Itanium libraries. The Visual C++ .NET 2003 Itanium libraries were available only by contacting libc7164@microsoft.com.

x64

The Windows Server 2003 SP1 release of the Platform SDK contained Visual C++ 6.0 64-bit libraries, but contained a prerelease version of the Visual C++ 2005 64-bit compilers. That caused some problems when used out of the box, such as having to link with bufferoverflowu.lib to enable /GS, which is the default in the compiler. Again, the Visual C++ .NET 2003 64-bit libraries were available only by contacting libc7164@microsoft.com.

News

  • As of April 2005, DirectShow has been removed from DirectX and moved to the Platform SDK instead. DirectX is however still required to build the DirectShow samples [1].

Building the samples

All samples found in the SDK can easily be built, assuming that Microsoft Visual Studio or the free Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 is already installed:

  • Start a Visual Studio Command Prompt or a Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 Command Prompt console as administrator.
  • Run the Setenv.bat file in the SDK root directory to set up the correct build configuration. This will typically be Windows XP 32 DEBUG, or Windows XP 32 RETAIL.
  • Run the nmake command in the directory containing the samples you want to build

Windows Vista

Starting with Windows Vista, the Platform SDK has been renamed the Windows SDK to better reflect the name and offer the documentation, samples, build environment and tools needed to develop Windows applications all in one place. Also, the SDK for .NET Framework 3.0 (previously known as WinFX) and .NET Framework 2.0 (which is also now a part of .NET Framework 3.0) is included in the Windows SDK. The Tablet PC SDK is also included. Thus, all the APIs which will ship with Windows Vista and the latest compilers are now integrated into the Windows SDK. However, the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK is not included since the .NET Framework 1.1 does not ship with Windows Vista.

The Windows SDK also allows the user to specify where the SDK will be installed and what components will be installed where with even more granularity. Also, it integrates better with Visual Studio, so multiple copies of tools are not installed. Information shown can be filtered by content such as only new Windows Vista content, only Win32 development content, only .NET Framework development content; or by language or a specific technology.

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