Windows Portable Devices Team Blog

Prior to the introduction of WPD, developers wrote a significant amount of code to integrate data from sensors into their Windows applications. But, with the release of WPD, it was possible to create a driver that handled communications between the operating...

The Guidelines for Picture and Video Import in Windows 7 white paper provides information about the picture and video import feature in Windows 7. The white paper includes guidelines for OEMs designing digital cameras and camera-equipped portable devices...

Today we are announcing the final release of the Platform Update for Windows Vista , which includes an update to WPD to support new features introduced in Windows 7. The Platform Update for Windows Vista features a set of runtime libraries which add support...

The Media Transfer Protocol Device Simulator (MTP Simulator) is a fully-featured, self-contained device simulator that emulates an MTP device. Its primary purpose is to enable developers to exercise expected behavior based on the MTP specification by...

With the release of Windows 7 we are seeing a great deal of maturity of the Windows Portable Device (WPD) Platform. The WPD Platform includes the WPD APIs with WPD Automation and native Device Services, the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) class drivers...

The Windows Portable Devices (WPD) SDK includes two sample command-line applications written in C++. The first application, WpdApiSample, lets the user accomplish tasks like: enumerating connected devices, exploring objects on these devices, and enumerating...

The Windows Portable Devices Driver Kit in the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) comes bundled with five WPD sample drivers. Two of these drivers, WpdHelloWorldDriver and WpdWudfSampleDriver, were available in previous versions of the WDK. The remaining three...

There are several different resources made available to portable device manufacturers to assist in device firmware and driver development, and to application developers wishing to create applications that interact with these portable devices. These resources...

In Windows Vista, the WPD team shipped an MTP driver with support for two transports: USB and TCP/IP (typically WiFi). This expanded support also introduced an interesting problem: to Windows, the same device connected twice looks like two different devices...

Introduction The Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) was originally created as an extension to the Picture Transfer Protocol but today it also supports media transfer, Device Services, command & control, and many other scenarios. MTP supports three transports...

In Windows 7, we introduced WPD Automation, which is a layer above the WPD API that exposes access to common WPD functionality through IDispatch. This post introduces this new component, and describes what you can and cannot do with WPD Automation...

What are Device Services? "Device Services" is a brand new concept introduced in Windows 7 that provides a framework for device manufacturers to extend device functionality, and new APIs for applications to discover and access that extended...

In Windows 7 we introduced several new features that improve how users discover and use devices connected to their PC. These new features simplify how device manufacturers present their devices, applications, and services in Windows. This behavior is...

We've created a Visual Basic .Net sample for WPD and posted it to CodePlex: Microsoft's open source project-hosting web site. Take a look at http://www.codeplex.com/wpdtempsensor In addition to the Visual Basic project and source files, we've posted...

The following post describes a gadget for Windows Sidebar that displays the temperature reading from a temperature sensor device. Similar applications could be written to display: battery-level or available memory for a portable media device, contact...

This article was written for application developers who are interested in displaying portable device data in the Windows Sidebar. It describes a Microsoft .Net application written in C# as well as a gadget for Windows Sidebar. The application was written...

Client Context Management in WPD Drivers A WPD driver provides the communication channel between applications and the physical device. There can be multiple WPD applications running at any time, and the driver needs to handle requests from different...

To develop WPD drivers for Vista SP1: - Build them using the Vista WDK (version 6000) or from the Longhorn Server Beta 3 WDK build environments. - WPD drivers built using Longhorn Server WDK Beta 3 will not run on Vista RTM or Windows XP, this is...

We mentioned in a previous post that the WPD sample drivers are not designed to enumerate in Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) due to compatibility issues. This post covers the changes needed to enable the WPD Comprehensive Sample Driver (WpdWudfSampleDriver...

We've published two new WPD developer-centric whitepapers at the Microsoft WHDC website for WinHEC. The first covers how to do WMDRM metering and license synchronization from a WPD application; the second describes how to port the existing WPD "Hello...

WPD Applications can specify a unique string "cookie" in the client information when calling IPortableDevice::Open : WPD_CLIENT_EVENT_COOKIE VT_LPWSTR Client supplied cookie returned by the driver in events posted as a direct result...

The MTP Specification contains this definition of the CancelTransaction Event: G.2.2 CancelTransaction Event Code: 0x4001 Parameter 1: None Parameter 2: None Parameter 3: None This event is used to initiate the cancellation of a transaction over...

A question was raised today on how to run the WPD sample drivers on Windows XP. WPD drivers and applications can run downlevel on Windows XP as long as the WPD and UMDF runtimes are both installed. Compiling a WPD Driver for your OS For the driver...

WPP Software Tracing is the recommended way to log trace and error messages in your WPD driver. WPP, short for W indows Software Trace P re P rocessor, provides an efficient real-time event logging mechanism. In addition, WPP traces include the system...

This post will compare WPD and the latest version of Windows Media Device Manager (WMDM) , from an application developer's point of view. Availability (aka SDK and Runtime Requirements) The Windows SDK contains the complete build environment (headers...