Nefarius.Tools.WDKWhere

CLI tool that resolves Windows SDK installation paths.

Motivation

This meeting could've been an email!

And this tool could've been a shell script 😅 wdkwhere was inspired by vswhere but for locating the Windows SDK installation folders instead. The SDK hosts quite a few nifty everyday developer binaries like signtool which by default are not easily invokable on the Terminal or in scripts since their respective directories are all not added to e.g. the PATH environment variable.

Granted, this could be somewhat automated via registry queries in PowerShell or even the CMD, or Python/VBS scripts and alike, but why not use a nice language like C# and make it a dotnet tool instead!

Installation

dotnet tool install --global Nefarius.Tools.WDKWhere

Usage examples

To display the help text and see all available flags run either

wdkwhere query --help or
wdkwhere run --help or
wdkwhere open --help

Basic usage

Calling wdkwhere without arguments simply returns the bin directory for the latest local WDK version and the current operating system architecture (most likely X64):

PS C:\Users\Administrator> wdkwhere
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Bin\10.0.22621.0\X64
PS C:\Users\Administrator>

Advanced usage

You can also directly run applications shipped with the WDK by using the run verb; here's how to verify a PE file signature with signtool and without having to deal with the installation path whatsoever:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> wdkwhere run signtool verify /pa /v C:\Windows\System32\consent.exe

Verifying: C:\Windows\System32\consent.exe

Signature Index: 0 (Primary Signature)
Hash of file (sha256): 829722E8F4EC6297337F26527AC4BB38D375605A0B36CF32988BDA0735ACF2C3

Signing Certificate Chain:
    ...truncated...

Successfully verified: C:\Windows\System32\consent.exe

Number of files successfully Verified: 1
Number of warnings: 0
Number of errors: 0
PS C:\Users\Administrator>

Both stdout and stderr of the invoked application are redirected to the current Terminal session and the exit code of the wdkwhere process is set to the invoked command exit code, so behaviour in scripts is basically unaltered to running the commands directly.