Pointless Blathering : Other

I've been style sheet hacking again

PeterWie — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:08:00 GMT

My last post ran into a hard-coded width in the winter style. I like the style, but i wanted the text to be full screen. Hopefully the style-sheet override i put in will work. If it doens't let me know in this topic and i'll try to figure it out.

Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available

PeterWie — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:49:07 GMT

There’s a new beta of WLW available. I used the previous version for the few posts that I did make and it was very useful.

The easiest way to try this version out is to post something, so here’s a picture of what my mornings are like these days (at least i think this was morning )

Code

PeterWie — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:33:03 GMT

Perhaps I'm just out of ideas, but I've decided to write about my coding style.

Coding style is usually a very personal thing, like any writing style. And as it usually causes some to foam at the mouth when brought up, I also wanted to put out this little disclaimer before I start.

You may agree with how I've chosen to do things, you may disagree, you may not care in the least. Please just take this as writing by someone who has been writing code a while and who likes to think about the process of writing code and building software.

At the least this can help my blog live up to its name :)

Don't trip over the skin change

PeterWie — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 22:41:50 GMT

I finally got back to my blog after coming back from vacation (two week drive down to disneyland with the wife … lots of fun) and noticed that the CSS overrides I'd done looked even worse than before.

However they also loaded a lot of new skins into MSDN blogs, so I picked a different one.

Expect the look to be in flux while I find one that I like.

-p

Thanks for a good WinHEC 2006

PeterWie — Fri, 26 May 2006 03:53:00 GMT

If i said that I wasn't happy WinHEC is over i'd be lying. But not by much - I had a very good time this year. I had a number of very interesting discussions with people - about how to use UMDF for their projects, about general kernel-mode programming questions, and even a few enjoyable ones around DMA :)

Meeting everyone, having good conversations and getting to peddle the work that we're doing is the fun of WinHEC for us Microsoft people. So for those of you who were there, thank you for that.

I hope the new look works okay

PeterWie — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:11:00 GMT

I was playing around with the CSS override stuff today. I hope i haven't blinded anyone.

I'm playing with the skins

PeterWie — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:54:00 GMT

So if this looks different each time you check the web page, please bear with me. I'm having trouble finding a skin that i like.

Who am I?

PeterWie — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:17:00 GMT

I've been trying to find time to start a blog for a while now. I figure the first question i'll be asked is "who are you and why should I care?". Like all things the answer to that isn't particularly easy.

If you're not interested in driver development, then you probably don't care & should spend time reading a more interesting blog. If you're interested in device drivers for Windows, then I'm hoping I may be of some assistance. I've made many, many mistakes while writing Windows drivers over the last 10+ years and I've tried to learn from all of them.

I joined MS straight out of college in 1995. I started working in the Windows NT device drivers team - which consisted of 5 other developers at the time. If it wasn't video or networking, our team most likely handled the drivers for it.

I started out working on SCSI miniport drivers - more specifically helping to maintain the third-party SCSI miniports that we shipped in-box. This was largely a diagnostic position, debugging problems when they came up in house, reviewing & integrating changes into the Windows source code base. It was a good learning experience to work with two separate code bases - the Windows base which was reasonably clean and comprehensible, and the device driver code which could be ... opaque ... at times.

I worked on some other driver stacks too. I owned the Parallel port driver for a while, as well as the drivers for the 8042 controller (a piece of hardware which still gives me a stomachache to this day.)

For Windows 2000 I did the bulk of the work converting the storage drivers over to Plug-and-Play. I can be blamed for such things as classpnp.sys, and the AdapterControl routines in SCSI miniports. I worked as the Development Lead for the mass-storage drivers team, who worked on all of the software between volume management (ftdisk and/or LVM) and the underlying controllers.

A few years ago I helped to start up the Windows Driver Foundation team. The goal of this team was to investigate technological solutions to improving the quality of device drivers using a variety of approaches. This includes the static verification tools like SDV and PreFast for Drivers (PFD), as well as the Windows Driver Framework (WDF) implementations in User-Mode and Kernel-Mode.

Currently I am the Development Lead for the User-Mode Driver Framework. This is an implementation of a subset of the WDF that allows developers to write drivers for some device types which will run in user-mode. If you think about your typical Windows system, there are a number of device drivers running on it which don't really need to be in the Kernel, and we're trying to provide an alternate system which builds on the design patterns already set down in WDF.

So that said, my desire here is to talk about Windows device drivers - the things that confused me as a starting developer, the things that I get questions about frequently, the things that I love about it and the things which drive me absolutely nuts.

-p