I am a creature of habit. Once I get into a pattern, especially with keyboard keys (i.e. my sleep key went missing ), it is very hard for me to break the habit and learn to do something else to achieve the same goal. One pattern I have grown accustomed...

Looking through some of the additions to the WDK, I found an interesting structure, RTL_RUN_ONCE . After a little more digging, I found that it is also exposed in user mode under a different typedef, INIT_ONCE . They both have the same set of functionality...

Well wait no more! We (the technical writers on WHDC and the WDF team) is working on a book and it was just announced (the description is currently a little wonky though). The book will cover both KMDF and UMDF and the static analysis tools (SDV and PreFAST...

When calling ObReferenceObjectByHandle , ObReferenceObjectByPointer , or ObOpenObjectByPointer you should be passing a non NULL value for the POBJECT_TYPE ObjectType parameter (more on why you should never pass NULL in a later post). Before Windows Vista...

If you are using DbgPrint for your debug output in Vista you may have noticed that you cannot see anything in the debugger. That is because DbgPrint now defaults to the DEFAULT debug component (you can read about the change here ) and the default settings...

A common question is "how do I write a device driver for my device which is connected over the serial port?" The answer depends on if your device conforms to the serial device numeration protocol (officially titled "Plug and Play External COM Device Specification...

I was in a code review earlier this week and someone pointed out the InterlockedOr, unlike the other InterlockedXxx operations, does not return the previous value. I found that hard to believe. I pulled up the MSDN docs and pointed this out Return...

Well, 5 long years later, Vista is out the door. Barely time to breath and enjoy it though, Longhorn Server (sorry for the mixup, the next server release apparently does not have a name yet...what do I know, I am just a developer ;) ) work is already...

Patrick has started blogging on WDF. He will be looking using both UMDF and KMDF as a way to write a driver for one device, it looks like it will be good based on our hallway conversations.

I found this one out the hard way today. I was experimenting with the KMDF loader driver (wdfldr.sys). I added the following #define to my sources file so that I could share code between wdfldr and another component and control some functionality based...

An updated document on WHDC lists the new DV features for Vista. Having used them, there are some great new additions to the verifier. One of the best features is the ability to start verification without a reboot. It has its limitations, but it is still...