Print

[Brouhaha]

The XDK allows you to do a few things:

1) Adds the ability to have Xbox game projects in Visual Studio (compiles XBE rather than EXE)
2) Remote debugging from Visual Studio of your Xbox applications
3) Content tools such as XACT, bundler, etc to allow you to have optimized resources for your games/applications, although you don't have to use them.
4) Unuseful stuff such as screenshots and videos.
5) even more stuff

To put it simply, the XDK is an add-on to Visual Studio, as is the DirectX SDK for example. Visual Studio is only the development environement wheras the XDK is basically the development librairies for Xbox, amongts other things.

See this tutorial for a step by step setup.