its just to add different windows libraries really

the platform SDK has a number of features including Direct Show

the visual C++ redist runtimes are MS's way of botching up all the DLL errors (google "DLL hell")

and alot of the service packs are pretty much just patches for the IDE / language.

Quote:Original post by Stowelly
its just to add different windows libraries really

the platform SDK has a number of features including Direct Show

the visual C++ redist runtimes are MS's way of botching up all the DLL errors (google "DLL hell")

and alot of the service packs are pretty much just patches for the IDE / language.

Those first two aren't service packs, they're libraries and packaging systems. A service pack is pretty much a patch though. The Windowx XP Service Pack 2 includes a ton of patches for the OS while a Visual Studio service pack would fix problems with that program. I know that one of the Visual Studio service packs changed the way intellisense worked a little bit (not really improving the actual intellisense, but displaying information about what it was doing in the task bar at the bottom) and I remember there was a problem in one the core C++ library where I believe std::stringstream had a memory leak. Here's a link. In fact, here's another link for all of the bug fixes.