DDC Day 3 (and final) soon to come
In my post about yesterday, I left out an observation I feel the need to make. My intent for listing the folks I met in the morning wasn't so much to drop names as to observe that (a) they were appreciative of what I have done in terms of blogging an newsgroup assistance (which is always easy feedback to accept, particularly from a stalwart group such as that) and (b) it's still something of a kick for me to be able to talk to them, and get some of the conversation you just can't carry out via email. As a developer, it's good to see what experts do, and as a provider of developer tools, its good to get the chance to collect all the unvarnished feedback you can about the utility of what you are providing.
I missed a lot of sessions yesterday I would have liked (such as Daniel Mihai's presentations on Driver Verifier). But I did catch Neslihan's presentation on WDF logo requirements [and I need to remember a couple of things we might want to add to that occurred to me overnight], and then Ilias and I did our first pass at the coinstaller presentation. Numbers were a bit light- maybe 2 dozen people was all, but I think we did fairly well overall in terms of just presenting our material, at least.
The Ask The Experts session was a bit lopsided- lots of experts, and something of a paucity of people wanting to ask. We did get a few questions (unfortunately both Doron and Eliyas were unavailable, and the rest of us still have some gaps- at least Peter was there for some of the tougher technical questions- some of the questions we didn't know sure answers to weren't actually all that technical- more along the lines of adoption numbers, which I sort of pay attention to, but only in the fuzzy, order of magnitude sense).
Got a couple more good test-related questions in hallway conversations, and finally met Penny Orwick, whom we all owe a debt to for her work on the WDF book, and to whom we owed a further debt as presenters because she edited our slides.
And now for something of greater utility...
As part of my preparation for the coinstaller debugging presentations at DDC and WinHec, I have put together this collection of information about WDF components for all shipped versions, along with related information, so there's a single place usable for triaging those occasional installation issues. Parts of it are still under construction (and some things I want to include require me to link to some files I host elsewhere), but I'm open to comments and suggestions, as always.
Finally, a warning about the shipping versions of WdfVerifier: I messed up the registry keyword for handle tracking in KMDF, so the tool won't actually manage that setting for you. If we provide a WDK with the "pre-beta" release of Windows 7 about to hit the streets [at WinHec and PDC], it won't have this fixed- but it will be there in the WDK tied to the Win7 Beta.
