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Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

A recent post on one of the OSR forums (http://www.osronline.com/cf.cfm?PageURL=showLists.cfm?list=ntdev) detailed some of the issues the driver development community has with the documentation. I'd like to invite anyone that has feedback to use this thread to let us know how we're doing... Specifically:

  • What are we doing well, that you'd like to see more of?
  • What we could do better?
  • What's completely broken -- impairing your ability to write great device drivers?

I commit to reading every response, and if you leave an email alias I'll be happy to acknowledge your feedback, and if actionable, create a tracking bug that we'll use to track the issue to completion.

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback, no matter how critical. I look forward to a lively discussion.

Keith Boyd, Sr. Content Publishing Manager [MSFT]

Published Wednesday, November 19, 2008 7:59 PM by wdkblog

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# infoblog » Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

Thursday, November 20, 2008 1:13 AM by Stéphane BARIZIEN

# re: Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

First of all, congrats for the "regular updates" idea. WDK documentation shouldn't be the well-hidden, always-outdated thing it's been in the past.

Moving to Document Explorer was probably not the greatest idea -- it's slow and slow and doesn't have the custom filters the old technologies used by VS6 and MSDN Library had. Please bring that back (for everything: MSDN, VS, WDK. Killing three birds with one stone!)

I have trouble getting the WDK doc "integrated" in the whole "Document Explorer world." I do get a new subtree under "Win32" but the search doesn't seem to find what I want. I have opened a thread on the msdn.general (and other -- xposted ;-( forums, you might want to join there, or follow-up here if you prefer. There's another thread about DE's "Local Help" search being slower than "Online" search, but this is probably not under *your* umbrella.

Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:17 AM by sba

# re: Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

Forgot to mention that the NG thread's subject is "Local Help search does not work in WDK documentation"

Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:48 AM by emusic

# KeSetSystemAffinityThread/KeRevertToUserAffinityThreadEx

KeSetSystemAffinityThread and KeRevertToUserAffinityThreadEx functions are documented very bad.

The "variable that receives a bitmap" is ambiguous. What means the "receives"? Usually it means a variable passed by reference to be altered by a function but this argument is passed by value. Much better is to write "variable that represents", "variable specifies" and something like.

The "system affinity" term used here means a temporary, system-only affinity but in Win32, it means a system active processor set.

Thursday, November 20, 2008 12:18 PM by wdkblog

# re: Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

Stephane, I'll review the thread and see if we can figure out what's going on. A couple of things currently being discussed:

1) Shipping the documentation as a standalone .chm at major release milestones. The downside is that the .chm will be about 50 megs, so a rather significant download. Let me know if you have feedback about that.

2) There is work underway here at MS to build a new help experience viewer. See this Channel 9 presentation for more information: http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/April-Reagan-The-Future-of-MSDN-Help/. This won't happen in the Win7 timeframe, but should eventually help w/ Doc Explorer issues. This new viewer is being implemented in part to address perf issues w/ Doc Explorer.

3) We'll get back to regular, monthly updates of the documentation on WHDC and MSDN in January. We haven't been able to update the docs on WHDC for a few months due to the work currently underway to document the Windows 7 Beta.

Thanks for taking the time to let us know about the problems you're having. I'll see if anyone I know has suggestions for fix the search problem you're experiencing w/ the Win32 node.

Keith Boyd [MSFT]

Thursday, November 20, 2008 12:20 PM by wdkblog

# re: KeSetSystemAffinityThread/KeRevertToUserAffinityThreadEx

I've forwarded your feedback to the writer for our Kernel mode documentation, and created a bug to address this issue. Look for a fix in the RC release of the WDK, possibly sooner on MSDN. Thanks for taking the time to provide the feedback.

Keith Boyd [MSFT]

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