WDK Documentation Group at DDC 2008
Hi folks! I recently represented the Windows Driver Kit documentation team at Driver Dev Con 2008 here at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, and I wanted to post a few thoughts from the conference. First, I wanted to thank everyone who attended the talk that Griffin, Craig and I gave on what’s new in the WDK for Windows 7. I presented what’s new in the documentation for Windows 7, and we had great attendance in both sessions. The repeat talk was in the final time slot of the conference, so it was nice to see a big turnout there too.
The highlight of my presentation was that at the Windows 7 Beta milestone, the documentation team is poised to deliver over two thousand new topics, across many different technologies. Based on feedback we have received, we’ve also started adding an expanded Requirements Block to reference pages that includes OS version, IRQL requirements, and header/lib information. As described in a previous post to this blog, we’ve also started to add “roadmap” topics for each technology that describe the end-to-end process for developing a driver for that technology.
I also mentioned that traffic on MSDN to the WDK documentation has doubled in the past year, so we are certainly seeing strong interest in driver documentation.
One frequent theme in our customer feedback has been dislike of the Document Explorer offline viewer that the WDK documentation currently uses. At DDC, I mentioned that Microsoft is working on a new documentation viewer to address these concerns. April Reagan is driving this project for the Visual Studio team and you can read the latest updates on April’s blog.
One feedback item I received during the conference was that new Build macros need documentation. You’ll be happy to know that we have added this documentation to our Beta release, so keep an eye out for it.
In the meantime, do keep sending feedback on the WDK documentation to ddksurv1@microsoft.com. We read each and every mail and try to take action where we can, with our limited resources.
I also mentioned that we have a new documentation manager on the team. His name is Keith Boyd and I’m pleased to announce that he will be at WinHEC 2008 next week in Los Angeles, so please pull him aside and say hi. Also keep an eye on this blog during WinHEC for a posting from Keith.
Ted Hudek [MSFT], WDK Senior Content Publishing Lead
