Windows 7 API Code Pack for .NET

Thursday July 2, 2009

The next version of Windows is only a few months away and Vista will then be consigned to the same shelf as Windows ME. Prices have recently been announced for some of the Windows 7 versions. MSDN subscribers of course have had access to the Release candidate for some time.

However if you're a Windows developer you might want to download the Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework. This provides a source code library providing access to new Windows 7 features, Directx 11.0 and some managed features of XP that were previously not available such as Sensor Platform APIs, Extended Linguistic Services APIs, Power Management APIs, Application Restart and Recovery APIs and Network List Manager APIs. You'll also need the Windows 7 SDK RC and the March 09 Direct x SDK. The download is 4.6MB plus there's another 6.3MB in CHM files.

The download contains 1,388 files nearly 1, largely .cs files. Open the WindowsAPICodePack in Visual studio and build it. There's a number of demos in the sample folder to show off the new features, some of which are cross-language, both C++ and C#. I'm not sure if you can build those in the express versions of Visual C++ 2008. and Visual C# 2008 but if you want to try....