One Day at a Time
It's been nearly a month since my last post (not counting one I made when I was in a really foul mood, later deleted). With the long-awaited arrival of my new associate Wei Mao from our Shanghai Lab, I'm hoping the endless high-priority interrupts become manageable.
But for now, I'm just going to post some fragments, rather than some grand theme.
WdfVerifier Errata (Bugs if you prefer)
These are still going to be there in the final Server 2K8 WDK. I've already fixed them for the next one after that, but in the meantime, be aware:
- If you are at the default prompting mechanisms (on UMDF, this means you will be prompted when you change ETW trace settings- on KMDF, it means you've made changes to one or more active devices, and we want to know if you want to try to disable and then re-enable the affected devices), and WdfVerifier determines it needs to reboot to complete the task, it is supposed to ask first. It doesn't. If you pick the intermediate step (try but ask if a reboot is needed) it does ask. If this proves to be a real problem for you, contact me, and I'll see what can be done to get you a fixed version ahead of time.
- There are some typos I mentioned in this article- I did get around to fixing them, just not in time for them to be important enough to stop the "ship-it" train.
Nice Technologies I've Begun to Work With
- WDTF- in the article I withdrew I had a script that would disable all devices using serial.sys and then installed the KMDF version of same. I'll repost that script at some future date.
- DSF- actually I've been using portions of it for years, but not portions I can talk about. But I have begun using USB device simulators, begin with the one Peter wrote for WinHec 2007- the erstwhile OSR FX/2 device. It's a natural for automated testing of the related KMDF and UMDF samples, for instance (because you don't need a human to flip switches or read displays- you can ask the simulation, instead).
What I'm hoping, at least for now, is that I can actually put something a bit more technical here, and perhaps those are two areas where I can eventually do so.
What a Way to Run a Railroad
Other than that, I've been working on the core of our test automation. Our internally generated test certificates have limited lifetimes, and we began to hit those limits. Also our overall signing and test packaging strategies kept failing to meet all of our needs.
Our solution- self-signing. IT turned out to be so easy, it's scary. We have one staging job that assembles all the pieces of a test package on the test machine, and it then creates a certificate, builds a catalog from all the content, installs the certificate, and signs the catalog with it. So far, that holds for everything. It also simplified the remaining test jobs- they had bewildering sets of parameters [those using DTM should know what I mean] so we could assemble everything. Now they just assume it's all staged and ready.
Once that was out of the way, I began on a bunch of deferred maintenance- bugs in tests that should have been fixed long ago and weren't. I hate to see test suites where false negatives and even bugchecks are so commonplace they get ignored. You KNOW something escapes anything that sloppily constructed! So I've been tightening up the loose hardware and repairing the broken pieces as fast as I can.
Things are a lot better now, but there's always more to do. As I mentioned here, PreFast continues to be a great help in making things more robust, even if it takes longer to complete "the simple ones". After all, if it had been done right in the first place, I wouldn't be doing it now...
Six letters that spell "relief"
Sorry, couldn't help that one...
As noted earlier, Patrick and I have a new colleague, named Wei Mao. He is a 7-year Microsoft veteran, and I'm afraid we scavenged Asia's premier DTM expert to bolster our sagging numbers. He's sitting in Doron's old office, leaving me odd man out still on this floor- it's for a good cause, though. But someday I'll actually sit somewhere near the people I work with...
But due to further attrition as I mentioned here, we still have two more openings for SDETs. Come on, now- you know you want to try it at least once in your career, don't you?
