Was the "Developer pack" originally called SDK?

Question

Quick question - is what Microsoft now calls the "Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2 Developer Pack" what was historically called the SDK?

Answer 1

Just a piece of history for reference.

When .NET Framework was 1.0 and 1.1, you need to have the .NET Framework SDK installed, so as to perform most command line tasks. That was how things got started.

.NET Framework 2.0 followed that tradition, has an SDK of its own. Later, Microsoft decided to merge .NET Framework SDK into Windows SDK.

You can find out such information by reading SharpDevelop's documentation on what are the dependencies. As a third party IDE, it always tells which are needed to build a project by assembling Microsoft's installers.

Recently .NET Framework has been updated more frequently, so Microsoft decided to ship Developer Pack as separate downloads. Like Hans Passant explained, this design is more closely related to Visual Studio compilation (referenced assemblies). It is more like a reorganization of different tools and utilities,

• Compilers, are now part of the .NET Framework installation (and also individual downloads from GitHub Roslyn repo).
• MSBuild, is now separate downloads (MSBuild from VS2015/2017).
• Developer Packs, provides referenced assemblies and others.