My travels with WDF

Well, as you could probably guess, I haven't had much to say for a while for a couple of reasons - first and foremost, the Windows 8 product cycle was really intense. A lot of changes under the hood came down the pipe, so with the big additions to WDF...

I hope those of you who are using the new Visual Studio 2011 with the WDK integration are having some fun, even if it’s just been wandering around and playing.  What, if anything, are you not liking about it?  Anything that’s unintuitive or...

If you’re watching what’s going on at //BUILD (and why wouldn’t you be?), you may have seen that UMDF now supports hardware access (via ports and registers) and interrupt handling! If you haven’t seen it, you can go read more here...

Greetings one and all (who may be only one left reading at this point *g*).  Some cool things are happening here which is why I’ve been heads down working.  And I can’t tell you about them just yet – pretty soon though..  But one of the...

  http://www.amazon.com/Developing-Drivers-Windows-Foundation-Developer/dp/0735623740/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294270728&sr=8-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735623743/   We now return you to your normally scheduled programming...

Was pondering a few questions the last few days. How many of you UMDF writers use ATL in your drivers? If you do, do you have more of a kernel driver background or a user mode background? Since UMDF works on an object model very similar to COM, the ATL...

A follow up question was posed from my last post about the WDF book no longer being in print and I thought it would be better to do a post so it will show up in RSS feeds; Q : Any idea what triggered this? I realize that our technology area doesn't sell...

  Sharing a cross post that is of interest to you WDF users; http://blogs.msdn.com/b/doronh/archive/2010/08/25/developing-drivers-with-the-windows-174-driver-foundation-i-e-the-wdf-book-is-apparently-out-of-print.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Greetings one and all!  Been heads down on some work around here and haven’t been able to post an update in a while. A couple of real good case studies have come up recently with regards to driver stability and effective testing of those drivers...

So as I was crafting some UMDF HID driver code for your consumption, and I was working with one of you (and you know who you are *g*) during some of that time frame, we sort of discovered everything already exists between my earlier blog posts and some...

Again, thanks to our intrepid explorer Ilia S. for helping uncover some more traps in the UMDF HID Collection Filter journey. Two things to keep in mind as you’re creating your driver: 1. UMDF drivers are hosted in a Session 0 based executable on Vista...

First of all, HUGE thanks to Ilia S. for helping to track down this little trap. I’m glad we finally got your driver up and running! Nothing like having an 8 hour time difference to slow things down. :) For those of you who like the 30 second version;...

Fresh from the oven, Windows Driver Kit (WDK) 7.1.0 is ready for your consumption! You can get it from the Download Center; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/results.aspx?freetext=WDK&displaylang=en&stype=s_basic Or off Microsoft Connect ...

Just wanted to make sure you all saw this great guest post on Doron’s blog from Jake Oshins. http://blogs.msdn.com/doronh/archive/2010/02/02/what-is-irql.aspx That’s all for today.

There have been a couple of asks recently, in various forums, on how to build drivers using Visual Studio. I thought since I had shown you how to make better use of Visual Studio as an IDE for driver writing , I better share the last yard of how people...

We recently had a good discussion internally about the nature of ASSERTs in code. I, being the rebel that I am, took the time honored stance of, “if you’ve hit it, you’ve triaged it and changed to code to handle that condition gracefully (at least as...

Got a good one to share with the group; Q: Can I make a kernel mode driver that opens a handle and talks to a UMDF based driver in another device stack? A: Why yes you can! Quite simply done provide you follow all the rules . This is a variant of...

So, some of you may recognize Eliyas’ name from WinHECs and various other driver dev presentations, but guess what he’s done now?!  He’s become a blogger. Go on feel free to hound him about your USB driver problems. :)

I got an interesting question via mail recently, “Do I really need to create a queue object in my UMDF driver?” Well, this is another one of those, “only if” type questions. For instance - Only if your driver is not handling any I/O from a top edge...

The subject of how to talk to another device stack has come up again, and since I only briefly touched on it a year ago , I thought it would be good provide some code snippets and a little more background on how to accomplish such a feat. The gist of...

The fourth part of Abhishek’s online UMDF debugging tutorials is up now. :) http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/umdftraining.mspx Next up, those of you playing with Windows 7 may have noticed that the “Found New Hardware” wizard is gone! ...

Like all good stories, sometimes the 2nd act is the hardest to follow. In this case it was simply a matter of other things coming up rather than writers block. :) What kicked me in the rump to get this next part up was a few more questions about driver...

Our wondrous Abhishek did a series of Debugging UMDF driver talks and I’m happy to say we now have the first three live on line! In these he covers some of the basics; where to find and how to use WDFVerifier, how to use some of the UMDF Debugger extensions...

UPDATED: 9-March-2010 Astute readers noted that I had the incorrect driver load order when talking about the UmdfServiceOrder directive. :) It IS left to right reading and the LEFT most driver is the lowest driver. In my previous post about Filter...

Filter drivers have come up in conversations recently (both internal and external), so I wanted to take some time here to address some of the issues that were brought up with regards to UMDF filter drivers and how to make them. Note: I’m not going to...