Re: Where's the goodies?

["David Botton" <David@Botton.com>]

It did cost a considerable sum for the Windows SDK in the beginning (I think
I still have my first Windows SDK sitting around on floppies some place, it
wasn't cheap).

When VC++ 1.0 came out and they packaged the Windows SDK with the compiler
(that cost about the same as the SDK alone.......  I wonder how many people
went ahead and purchase VC++ instead :-) Following that, the price started
dropping on the SDK slowly but surely.

Vendors had to pay for the right to distribute the Windows SDK and it was
bundled with their compilers (Cost still there, just hidden to you), and in
fact still do.

Since VC++ is about the only major compiler left on Win32 (gcc and borland
are small potatoes, the rest are all gone) no reason not to make the latest
SDKs more easily available to everyone.

In fact parts of the SDK (some of the tools) only work if you have VC++. For
example MIDL and important part of programming COM/DCOM only works if you
have VC++ (I just started work this weekend on a replacement that compiles
an XML definition of a COM/DCOM object in to a type library for use with
GNATCOM, just to get around this problem).

David Botton



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Quinn" <thquinn@bellsouth.net>
> Yeah I sure wish Microsoft would charge a lot of money for their SDKs
> instead of giving them away for free!
>
> Errr...whatever pal.