The following versions of the SDK have been released to the public unofficially and can be found on sites like : This was very welcome by existing Windows PC developers and was considerably easier to use than the PS2 or Gamecube development environments.
Unsurprisingly the XDK requires Microsoft Visual Studio as the IDE and Microsoft Visual C++ compilers. This was a stark contrast to the SDKs from the previous generation that would only have a handful of releases during the whole lifetime of the console. This was mainly due to the frequency in which the XDK changes, new builds would be available very frequently, at least a couple every month. This was only provided to developers on their Xbox Developer Services website () and not via CD/DVD. The Official software development kit for the original xbox was called the XDK (Xbox Development Kit).
