May 05

Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).

The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems.  The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.

The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:

  • Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
  • Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
  • Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
  • Tools – Several new tools added
  • Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT

Windows SDK
More .NET News

Mar 03

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) simplifies the creation of extensible applications.  MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions.

MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem.  Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch.  Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.

Continue reading »