I got back from vacation today and went to connect.microsoft.com to see if the WDK beta was up yet, and i'm happy to say that it is. It's a fairly large (2.3 GB) ISO image to download and i'm pulling it down now to make sure it works okay.

Here are the steps i had to follow to get into the beta:

  1. Navigate to connect.microsoft.com and sign in using your passport account (the passport link is at the top right of the web page).

  2. Go to the Available Programs page (there's a menu link on the left side of the window) and scroll down to find the Microsoft Windows Driver Kit (WDK) Beta Program entry then click on the Apply/ link.

  3. Decide if you agree with the terms and conditions. If you do then click on the I Agree button at the bottom of the screen.

  4. This should bring you to the Mandatory Surveys page. The Beta 2 Feedback survey is very, very short so you should just take it. If you want to skip it there's a link for that too, but I'm guessing that you'll be forced to take it by 6/15 if you want to keep access to the beta site (based on the web page content).

  5. Either way you'll end up at the web page for the WDK beta. There's nothing really on the page, but you can get the kit from the Downloads link in the menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

  6. On the downloads page, choose the last item (WDK Beta 2). Downloading this requires that you install an ActiveX control, and the download will take a while. Once you're done you should be able to burn it to a DVD using your favorite tool, or use the Virtual CD-ROM tool to mount the image. from Microsoft.

    For purposes of this discussion, we'll assume you mount the ISO image (either with a DVD or VirtualCD) on z:.

  7. Open Z: and run Installer.exe. This will let you install the prerequisites and then the build environment and doc set. Install whatever other parts you see fit.
You should now have a kit installed which will let you build UMDF drivers for use on Windows Vista (beta of XP support is on the way.) I'll talk about getting started with that later.

Enjoy.

-p