Access Windows 7 features with .NET

Question

I just upgraded my operating system to Windows 7. Visual Studio 2008 also seems to work perfect. Next step is to upgrade my .NET application to use the new Windows 7 features. A quick seach with Google returned the following links:

• Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework
• Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Does anyone know what exactly is needed for access the new Windows 7 features with managed code?

Answer 1

The Windows SDK is the complete package you need to write and compile applications for Windows. A complete SDK is also included with Visual Studio (though, in the case of VS 2k8 it's the Vista SDK). There are all needed header files and such, but no native .NET bindings for all the new stuff.

That's where the Windows API Code pack comes in. It wraps those shiny new things in Windows 7 into nice .NET classes so it's much easier to use than P/Invoking everything. Even though that's what it's behind the scenes.

You should get by with only the latter, unless you want to access that functionality from C/C++ as well.