Last week I complained that Microsoft hadn’t made the benefits of SAL available to people who didn’t plunk down the money for their top-of-the-line development tools. Well, today Michael Howard pointed out that the Vista beta 2 SDK includes PREfast and can therefore take advantage of SAL. I’m downloading the new Vista stuff now (still…), and I can’t wait to check this out for myself. I’m glad Microsoft decided to take my excellent advice, even before I offered it!
It’s not a perfect solution, though; you still have to be an engaged enough developer to go looking for this stuff (i.e. I didn’t know it was there, for example), and it’s not clear to me if this integrates into the VS build environment. But, it’s definitely a start – I can start recommending SAL to everyone now, even if it is a bit of extra work.