Can two different Windows SDK versions coexist on the same machine without conflict?

Question

I have a machine with Vsiual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 and Windows SDK version 6.1 (Windows Vista). I am planning to install the latest SDK (Windows 7 and .Net 3.5 Service Pack1), but the MSDN Comptabilty document (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd146047.aspx) indicates that the latest SDK is not recommended with VS 2005. I would like to check if the two SDKs can coexist on the same machine or the latest SDK will oevrride the older version and could cause issues with VS 2005.

Thanks

Answer 1

Just a word of warning, the 7.0 SDK has a badly broken installer. It hacks registry keys that are used by Visual Studio to find SDK components and drops files in the VS install directory. This can render it unusable. The worst problems are documented as sticky posts in the Windows SDK forum at the MSDN forums.

I had problems as well, the installer failed half-way through on my machine with a completely undescriptive error. On a pretty virgin machine with VS2008. It didn't roll back the install even though it failed, I had to edit the registry by hand to fix the damage.

I recommend you actually install the SDK on a machine you don't care about. Then copy the directory to a production machine and edit the VC++ directories yourself. Do strongly favor the v7.1 version instead. Good luck with it.

Answer 2

Should be fine as long as you don't try and install both versions of Visual Studio in the same folder. The SDK is essentially passive, you can have as many of them as you want installed, but you need to make sure that the paths that VS 2005 uses are to the older SDK rather than the newer one.

Since by default, the SDK is installed in a subfolder of the Visual Studio install folder, a long as you put different versions of VS in different folders, everything should work out fine all by itself.