WDF support channels changing, looking for more info on installation issues
The more things change- the more they... whatever.
Two issues in today's entry, both coming from a response to my most recent article. The email support addresses for WDF are changing, and the KMDF address has been broken for a few weeks. Please use wdfinfo@microsoft.com as your direct line to the WDF teams. The kmdffdbk and umdffdbk addresses still function for the time being (and will automatically remind you)- well, the KMDF address will once IT figures out why it stopped working...
Can't investigate or fix the ones we don't know about
My correspondent mentioned in an off-hand way they have been "fixing" field installation problems by uninstalling existing framework versions before installing their driver. You should never need to do this! Sooner or later someone is going to use this method and it will break an existing driver, possibly fatally.
If possible, please do the following before you do this:
- Collect the setup logs (see Doron's article on logs for failed device installations).
- Run my data collection batch file ("Bob's handy-dandy" one) from this earlier article of mine.
- If the customer consents, contact info (if they consent to you but not to us, that's fine, too- sometimes further follow up is needed)...
- Send the info to wdfinfo@microsoft.com. Or to me, or to your customer support people and tell them you're sure that we'll want it.
If you can't do that, it would be great to at least know how often you're having to do this (and I'm gonna be pushing for more data collection for installation problems, because I've got a pretty good idea how accurate information collected via such methods is going to be). Tell us what you can. Please don't assume "we know about it", or that "it's normal". It may take us time to get it right, but that doesn't mean we don't want it to be right!
We may have something less painful for reporting or analyzing these things at some point, as well- it's been discussed- but there's only so many hours in the day, and yada, yoda, coda...
