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 (UMDF especially) we really had a ton of work to...

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 confusing?  What do you like about it, but would...

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 . And the other big one. Something I’ve...

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 (remember, you have to be signed in to your connect...

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 gracefully as possible), it’s safe to remove that...

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 the UMDF initiated cross stack communication we...

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!  This in itself is not that big a deal, but it...

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 writing, WDK integration into Visual Studio and...

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 cover all the configuration dynamics available for...

Yes, I know that's a rip off of a ThinkGeek shirt (which I own). Well, this is going to be my second post on this topic (okay, third ), but as it managed to rear its head again recently, what better time to blog.  And I'm going to also blog it simply to prove to Doron that I can provide something...

Greetings from the Pacific Northwet. After our recent Snow-pocalypse, we also suffered a run of flooding. Amazingly enough, it wasn't directly due to the 13+ inches of snow I had at my house, it was a combination of the snow and the monumental amounts of rain that followed. Quite a few people were literally...

Most of you at the DDC will notice that I'm not at the DDC. I'm guessing that makes me one of the "juniors" that Bob was referring to. ;) 4.) How do you build debugging techniques into your driver? Ie, DbgBreakPoint, ASSERT, etc - which is best in various situations? This is one of those personal...

I got a few interesting questions recently, which was helpful because I was having a tough time finding good material for you guys and gals of late. That's the problem with working on the next Operating System, I can't tell you about all the cool stuff yet. *g* So here's today's question (in two parts...