There have been some reports of teams having issues installing the Kinect software. Some teams may be deciding that since they are not going to do any programming on their own that they can skip some steps. Having Visual Studio 2010 Express or some other edition of Visual Studio is actually a requirement though. That may (or may not) change in the future but for now you need to install it.
Summarizing from the Readme file:
Supported Operating Systems
Software Requirements and order of installation for installing the Kinect for Windows SDK
- .NET Framework 4.0 [prerequisite install even if you don’t program] - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Express (C++ or C# or other Visual Studio 2010 edition [prerequisite install even if you don’t program] - http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
- Kinect for Windows SDK beta (choose the appropriate version x86/32 bit or x64/64bit to match your copy of Windows 7) - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/.../download.aspx