This is my last post in this blog. After 4 years at Microsoft, it's time for me to move on. This fall I'm starting a MBA degree at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (Go Wildcats!). My experiences at Microsoft have been excellent,...

The USB core team has started a new blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/usbcoreblog/ . They'll be discussing about everything that is related to USB. Welcome to the blogosphere USB Team :)

A while ago, I wrote a blog post about our UMDF debugging videos , which were created by my teammate Abhishek. Now, I'm really excited to announce that we've released KMDF debugging videos, which can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools...

I've been asked many times, if a driver developer can avoid using WDF coinstallers. The answer is "yes, if the system already has the needed version of WDF installed (e.g. you want to install a WDF 1.5 driver in Vista RTM)". So, the next question that...

UPDATE: You can find my post about KMDF debugging videos at http://blogs.msdn.com/iliast/archive/2009/09/22/kmdf-debugging-videos.aspx A while back I had written that we didn't have any videos, where we talk about UMDF (KMDF seems to get all the glory...

One feature that is really helpful in debugging WDF drivers is the log file that is created by the frameworks themselves. In the log files you can see many warnings and errors that are created by the framework (i.e. they come for free and the driver does...

Many months ago I had written a post analyzing the installation of WDF 1.5 drivers . Now that WDF 1.9 is almost out of the door, it's time to do the same thing for WDF 1.7 and 1.9. The differences in the coinstallers for these 2 versions are small, so...

This post is a small quick-start on how to install WDF drivers. Part 1: Installing a UMDF driver You can start with the echo sample, which is located at %WinDDK%\6001.18002\src\umdf\echo. First, you need to do a bcz in that directory. In your output...

You might know that the Windows Driver Framework team is working on the next version of WDF, version 1.9, and planning to release it with Windows 7. Windows 7 will have this new version of framework built in. However, we will also provide a redistributable...

As many of you know, WinHEC 2008 took place in Los Angeles, at the beginning of this month. I gave a presentation in the conference with Bob Kjelgaard about the WDF coinstallers and WDF logo requirements. This presentation includes a step-by-step walkthrough...

UPDATE (10/31/2008) : We just released the Windows Server 2008/SP1 WDK, which includes the coinstallers. This WDK is versioned as 6001.18002 and can be found here . Apart from the coinstallers, this WDK also has some additional changes, which are described...

One of the most common question that beginner driver developers ask is how they can start learning about driver development. Today, Eliyas, my manager, pointed out that we have already created a study guide that covers WDF and general Windows device driver...

Next week (9/29 - 10/1) we'll have the Microsoft Windows Driver Developer Conference (DDC) in Redmond. We're expecting several driver developers. I'm excited about this, not only because it's the first time that I'll be participating in a Microsoft conference...

I found a very interesting channel9 video on how to debug BSODs (Blue Screens of Death): http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Daniel-Pearson-Debugging-a-Windows-Blue-Screen-of-Death/ Daniel Pearson explains why blue screens happen in Windows, how a user...

Diomidis Spinellis has written a good paper for the “30 th International Conference on Software Engineering” (ICSE ’08) that looks at the code quality of the source codes of Windows (WRK – Research Kernel based on Windows Server 2003), Linux, Solaris...

UPDATE 10/02/2008 : The WDF 1.7 RTM coinstallers were released on 4/18/2008. For more information on how to download them, please look at http://blogs.msdn.com/iliast/archive/2008/10/02/where-are-the-wdf-1-7-rtm-coinstallers.aspx Lately, I've been hearing...

Lately, I've been hearing lots of questions like "why do we need this bloated KMDF/UMDF coinstaller?" or "why don't you use an msi" or "why doesn't a WDM driver always need a coinstaller?", etc both in some mailing lists and in emails. So, I'd like to...

In this post I'll try to clarify some small details, that are related to debugging a user-mode process (focusing on a UMDF driver) using a kernel-mode debugger. So, the setup is that we have a test computer, where the UMDF echo driver is running and another...

Today morning I received an email from Patrick with a picture of Visual Studio with Intellisense on a WDF driver . Ok, I have to admit that in the beginning I thought that Patrick was using Photoshop! He's a guy, who just doesn't like GUIs in the first...

During this weekend I went to the Seattle Code Camp v3.0 . The talks were mostly oriented towards .NET,so it was a good opportunity for me to get a better understanding of all those buzzwords that are unknown to the world of drivers. I also had the opportunity...

I've been reading quite a bit for the last couple of months and I compiled my list of the 5 Windows development books that I want to complete: 1) Windows Internals (finished): The classic book by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon is now in its 5th edition...

Last Friday (12/7/2007) we completed the final build for the Windows Server 2008 RC1 WDK (you can find it here ), which includes WDF 1.7 RC1 (both UMDF 1.7 and KMDF 1.7). Beware, though, that this is just the WDF RC1 version and not the RTM one, so you...

The goal of this post is to provide an insight about the installation of UMDF and KMDF 1.5 drivers and to show how to overcome any potential problems. For demo purposes I'll be using the UMDF and KMDF echo driver, which can be found at the WDK (%WinDDK...

The last few months I've been working on the WDF 1.7 (UMDF+KMDF) coinstallers (that's one of the reasons that I've been silent for quite some time). Through this process I managed to learn a lot of things about how driver installation works and what is...

Everybody knows how an application communicates with a driver: call CreateFile to open a handle to the PDO, and use ReadFile(Ex), WriteFile(Ex) and DeviceIoControl to read data, write data or send a control code. However, what about the opposite? How...