In a single word, the answer is “No”. The SDK, as the name suggest, is a developer toolkit, which requires only for development. “Kinect for Windows Runtime”, can take care of the Kinect application execution in the end user system or production environment when you have an executable Kinect application along with other application dependency.
The Kinect for Windows SDK install the drivers, assemblies as well as the runtime. To check which components
are installed, you can navigate to the Install and Uninstall Programs section of Control Panel and search for Kinect. The following screenshot shows the list of components that are installed with the SDK installer:
The default location for the SDK is %ProgramFiles%/Microsoft SDKs/Kinect. When you install the Kinect for Windows SDK, it creates a Redist directory containing an installer. This is designed to be deployed with Kinect applications, which install the required runtime and drivers to run the Kinect application. This is the path where you can find the setup file after the SDK is installed:
%ProgramFiles%/\Microsoft SDKs\Kinect\v1.7\Redist\KinectRuntime-v1.7-Setup.exe
This can be used with your application deployment package, which will install only the runtime and necessary drivers.
Note: The SDK version name may be different in your system. Screenshots and path is given based on the current SDK ( v1.7) version.
Couple of days back, one of my blog reader asked me this question and I thought to share this answer here, so that it may helpful to others as well.
