I've just installed (and reinstalled to see if it would work the second time, with no luck) the March DirectX SDK onto a Vista-64 (Home Premium) machine with Visual Studio 2008 (Professional Edition) already installed. Everything appears to go smoothly but when I have a look under Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->VC++ Directories there is no path for the DirectX libs or includes added. When I check the Windows environment variables DXSDK_DIR has been added though, which is good. Now I'm sure(ish) that I've never had this problem before and the installer has always just added the paths to VS; I even made the point of making sure VS wasn't running during the installation just incase it caused this problem. It would be easy enough for me to add them manually, but my question is why is the installer not doing this and is there anything else it's sneakily not doing too? Thanks.

It's been a long time since I've installed a DirectX SDK, so I don't recall what they used to do. I can confirm that the March one doesn't modify the Visual C++ directories, and I think it's better that way. System-wide include/library overrides are dangerous. It makes more sense to add directories per project instead.

I have added the dirs for at least the March 09, and November 08 SDKs. I didn't think anything of it...

EDIT: I think this way you can have more than one SDK installed and still work with whichever one you want to. That could help if you were using a legacy SDK for VS/PS 1.1 support for instance, but still wanted to do testing with the newer SDK.

Yeah I seem to remember that being the case with the latest SDK release. It also doesn't modify the PATH environment variable anymore, either.

Thanks a lot, that's just what I wanted to hear.
I've decided to add the paths globally (into the 'VC++ Directories' interface) but only because I'm lazy ([rolleyes]), I do agree with Muhammad that they probably ought to be part of the per-project configuration really.