Over the past few days, Microsoft has republished all of the Windows Driver Kit documentation on MSDN Library. This act was the culmination of over six months of work to migrate our source docs to a different, XML-based content management and authoring system (the same one that's been in use by the Windows SDK team for some time). In addition to providing us with an improved authoring and content management system, this migration brings several benefits for you. These benefits include updated syntax and header information, better abstracts for search results, and cleaner formatting of the content.

This move was no small undertaking. The kit documentation contains over 32,000 topics. The former system, which we called CAPE, used a hybrid of Microsoft Word and a very loose XML schema. Without a straightforward way to map between XML elements in the old and new schemas, transforming that much content introduced all sorts of issues. It took at least 30 people to get us to the point where we're comfortable republishing this content, and much of what they had to do ended up being painstaking, manual, page-by-page repairs. I'm proud of the work the documentation team performed and the professionalism with which they tackled the job.

I wish I could say that we got it all perfect. I’m sure that we didn’t. In the coming months, we’ll continue to refine what we’ve done, but I want to ask for your patience as we find and fix bugs introduced by the migration. You probably won’t even notice many of the minor bugs, such as a change in formatting or a word that’s no longer linked to another topic. Others might be quite obvious, such as a missing space between words or (rarely, we think) a missing paragraph.

We have not republished the EXE or CHM file (available here), so if you think a topic is missing some information that you need and have seen before, please do use those builds.

Here are some other things that we think you should know about:

• On our reference pages, we regenerated all the syntax blocks from the WDK headers. The syntax in the new docs should be a much better match to the headers than what we published before. A side effect, though, is that some new members may appear that do not yet have complete descriptions.
• New description metadata will provide improved search functionality on any search engine.
• Using search to find information will continue to yield the old documentation for a few days. To see the new documentation, you will need to browse to it by using the MSDN left-pane navigation.
• The old documentation will be replaced with "Content Moved" pages that provide a link to the new, replacement page. Over time, these redirector pages will stop showing up in search results, which will favor the new topics. 

If you spot an error on a page, please click the “send comments” link at the bottom of the page or provide a comment when you rate the page. Please do continue to give us your feedback on the documentation. We’re listening!

Jim Travis
Group Content Publishing Manager
Windows Hardware and Devices