How do I install XamlPad?

Question

This is going to sound silly, because everyone seems to take it for granted that XamlPad is just there, including the MSDN article about XamlPad.

But I've installed Visual Studio 2008, which AFAIK installs the .NET 3.5 SDK (how could it not?), which is supposed to include XamlPad. But there is no XamlPad.exe in my Start Menu or anywhere on my PC. I've even done a dir /s xamlpad.exe from the command line, to make sure the problem isn't with the Windows Indexing Service not seeing what's in front of its face like usual. No dice.

I'd like to demo some XAML to my co-workers, but I don't want to use the godawful XAML designer in Visual Studio if I can help it. How do I get a copy of XamlPad to install onto my PC?

I'm running Vista 64-bit if that makes any difference (it shouldn't, but you never can tell).

Answer 1

At the bottom of the MSDN page there's this comment:

The Start Menu shortcut is not installed by VS2008

The program binary is installed however in Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin

I've just checked on my machine and it's there.

For newer versions of Windows and Visual Studio the SDK version will be 7 or 8. The latest on my machine (Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2013) is v8.1A and it's in Program Files (x86) on 64 bit versions of the OS. So you will need to look in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows

and see which version you have installed.

There's also a link on that MSDN page to the new version on the author's blog.

Answer 2

Kaxaml is a good alternative for XAMLPad, or even a good replacement for it.