Install prerequisite Windows SDK with Azure Pipelines

As part of some long-overdue maintenance of my open source NAudio project, I updated to use the latest .NET 6 SDK and switched to the 10.0.18362.0 Windows SDK (1809). This unfortunately broke my Azure Pipelines build because it was hard-coded to use a vmImage of windows-2019 which only has Visual Studio 2019 installed.

I switched my vmImage to windows-latest which gives you Windows 2022 with Visual Studio 2022 installed. However, this one didn't come with the Windows 10 SDK that I needed. There's a helpful document that lists everything installed on the VM image which for some reason skips over the SDK I needed.

However, after a bit of digging I found that it's very easy to install a specific version of the Windows SDK using, chocolatey, a Windows package manager that is helpfully already installed.

All I had to do was add a new -script entry under steps:, and run the choco install windows-sdk-10.1 --version=10.1.18362.1 command, to pick out the specific SDK I needed.

This script can be any PowerShell, so you could obviously use it to set up any other pre-requisites you need for your build. Here's my final azure-pipelines.yaml file:

pool:
  vmImage: 'windows-latest' 

variables:
  solution: '**/*.sln'
  buildPlatform: 'Any CPU'
  buildConfiguration: 'Release'

steps: 
- script: choco install windows-sdk-10.1 --version=10.1.18362.1

- task: NuGetToolInstaller@1

- task: NuGetCommand@2
  inputs:
    restoreSolution: '$(solution)'

- task: VSBuild@1
  inputs:
    solution: '$(solution)'
    platform: '$(buildPlatform)'
    configuration: '$(buildConfiguration)'

- task: VSTest@2
  inputs:
    platform: '$(buildPlatform)'
    configuration: '$(buildConfiguration)'
    testFiltercriteria: 'TestCategory!=IntegrationTest'