A New Target Date For WDF 1.7!

As noted in the previous post (among others), I've not been saying anything about when WDF 1.7 will reappear for all those eager to begin using it, biding my time and waiting for a date that sounds achievable and has been given to a customer from our Program Management team.

Well, that's happened, and it's a day familiar to most U.S. taxpayers: April 15th, 2008.  For those not in the US, that's the day income tax payments and their associated paperwork for the previous year are due [although you can get an extension on the paperwork by just filing more paperwork].

I've been involved in the testing, and this date certainly looks achievable.  So hopefully this sad sorry saga is soon to be behind us. Still, I feel the need to stress- this is not guaranteed to happen.  I could never guarantee such a thing, especially given what's already occurred.

Could I be a little more vague?

I've decided to shed a bit more light on what happened here.  As I mentioned here and here, our problems trace to the fact that we are a part of the OS itself beginning with Windows Vista, and this introduced us to new update technologies [both new to us and new to the world of OS updating in general] that we just didn't know as well as one could have hoped.

The initial problem (and the one we were well on our way to fixing by that original March 15th date) was that the mechanism we used to update KMDF 1.5 to KMDF 1.7 was undone by a must-have fix to KMDF 1.5 that was finalized and released later than Server 2008.  We knew about it, but we did them in the reverse order, and thus were quite surprised by this.

But in the world of OS fixes, there are two classes of fixes- those we know apply to all users (general distribution) and those that apply only to specific cases (limited distribution).  When broad sets of fixes like service packs are made, a decision has to be made which fixes are included and which can be updated or superseded.  Turns out we didn't understand this, properly, either.

So our second issue- the one mentioned in the previous post (link above)- came when we found out the UMDF 1.7 coinstaller failed to work when one of those "limited distribution" fixes was present.  It seems our coinstallers could not update ANY fix of that sort.  Worse, fixing it so they could meant changing the way they were built and packaged- I show here how to disassemble it, so that should give you an insight into the underlying complexity.  But it's even harder than that would look, because the packages I extract there contain more internals you don't need to look at to solve the problem I was describing in that article.

So, learning what needed to be changed, getting the build processes changed, verifying the new processes [and there's a bunch of manual work all the way through all of that], and finally getting the ultimate packaged product and going through all of these new scenarios we now know we need to watch out for- all of that took a lot of time.

The silver lining

Well, the ongoing staffing problems I've been mentioning are getting handled.  This is the first round of manual coinstaller testing in what seems like a very long time where I was not doing much of the QA single-handed (speaking only of KMDF, and I've always had some assistance, even then).  Instead Wei Mao (whom I first mentioned here) did the super-critical stuff while I tried to get some new test features [behind schedule due to a host of reasons] ready.

Patrick, Shyamal, myself and Wei then spread out and did all that legacy stuff- will WDF 1.7 update WDF 1.5 or less?  On all the OS we support?  Do OS upgrades disturb this?  Will it install when no WDF version was previously present?  Do we still get public symbols (in case the build changes disrupted anything)?  Do the debugger extensions still work?  I even picked at things a bit with WdfVerifier- and so on.  While Ilias was involved in the earliest stages, he was able to fix a bunch of bugs [many of those coinstaller "suggestions" of mine] while we did this.

So the team is beginning to function like it should again, and that is always a good thing.

Now playing- Yuki Kajiura [Fiction]: Fake Wings

Tsuneo Imahori [trigun the first donuts]: Philosophy in a Tea Cup

There were a slew of others, but for a change, I wasn't at all diligent about noticing- these were the final two...