Monthly MSDN WDK Documentation Refreshes
I started my life at Microsoft as a developmental editor on Microsoft Access and Visual Basic. We distributed the documentation as a set of books. Just before we shipped, they asked me to cut the reference documentation by 20%. This would save a lot of printed pages and money. This probably didn't serve the customer well, but money was tight back then and we were sure that Borland's Paradox database was going to blow Access out of the water.
Fast forward 17 years. Access is still around and so am I. But delivering printed books as documentation is not. The Windows Driver Kit used to be available as a set of books, but now it's not. We used to ship the WDK every time there was a major release, but you could only get it on a CD. And only with the kit. But now for everything we've taken away, my hope is that we're giving you something better. I like books, but blogs and web pages are a lot more efficient.
We know you want more information and you want it more often. For a while we've had the docs available by themselves on the WHDC web site, and they still are. You can download the whole doc set at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKdocs.mspx. This is updated frequently.
However, we want to do even better than that. Our docs are also on the web, every single page. So if you want to look up IoReportTargetDeviceChangeAsynchronous you don't have to download the docs, you can just check it out on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms801228.aspx.
For the past few months we've been trying to update the MSDN docs every month and that will be our goal moving forward. We understand that not all of you have online access all the time, and that's why we'll continue to give you alternatives. Please let us know what formats you prefer and we're working on new solutions all the time so that you get the information you need.
For the month of December we're not going to do a full refresh of the MSDN docs because we just got through with the November 18002 release of the entire WDK and the Windows 7 Beta (whew!). But we are going to do a minor refresh of a few new topics that we didn't want to wait until January for. Stay tuned for the exact details.
— Seth McEvoy [MSFT], WDK Docs Blogmaster
