They have been part of the .NET framework since .NET 2, anyway. The only change now is that you can download them separately in a package with MSBuild (which wa

They have been part of the .NET framework since .NET 2, anyway. The only change now is that you can download them separately in a package with MSBuild (which was previously only bundled with Visual Studio or the Platform SDK, if I remember correctly). But indeed, that's not a very big change, given that they were free before already.