Windows Kit 8.0 and Visual Studio 2012 - are they shipped together? [closed]

Question

I'm a novice with Visual Studio 2012 development and I have been given a machine where there are some header files I need in the following directory

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit. I read that the Windows 8 SDK isn't shipped with VS2012 and I can't read any "Microsoft Windows 8 SDK" on the list of installed apps on my machine (on the uninstall list).

My question is: is this directory and its relative content part of VS2012? I don't have a VS2012 iso file so I cannot reinstall it right now (as I told the machine was given to me to work on it and the software was already installed in it)

Answer 1

That's the home directory for the version 8 Windows SDK. Microsoft ships that as a separate download to allow programmers to develop Windows programs with tooling other than VS. But the VS2012 includes it since you cannot build any Windows programs without it. And it won't show up as a separate item in the uninstall dialog. That would be a bad idea since uninstalling it would break VS.

Not sure why you are thinking of tinkering with it, but clearly you'll need to be careful to not destroy your VS install. Downloading and installing the separate SDK is otherwise a supported scenario. The install bootstrapper is available here. Only use it to fix a real problem, it isn't clear what that might be.

Answer 2

I would say yes, take a look: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/hh852363.aspx

Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8

If you require a complete development environment that includes compilers and a build environment, you can download Visual Studio 2012 Express, which includes the appropriate components of the Windows SDK.