Windows Driver Kit (WDK) Documentation Blog : WDK Issues

MSDN Wiki Discontinued for WDK Documentation

wdkblog — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:32:00 GMT

We’ve decided to shut off the Community Content (aka “wiki”) section of WDK documentation on MSDN.

A few months ago I provided this blog post, which questioned the usefulness of the Community Content feature for WDK documentation. Your responses to that post, and other feedback that we have received, confirmed our impression that the Community Content feature is providing little value to our customers.

We continue to value your feedback about our documentation. We encourage you to point out errors and provide suggestions, and to send them to us by clicking on the “send feedback” link that’s at the bottom of each topic. The link appears both in the offline documentation that installs with the kit and in the online version on MSDN.

Community Content removal coincides with the Windows 7 RTM update of WDK documentation on MSDN.

— Richard Brown [MSFT], WDK Senior Programming Writer

Do You Have the Very Latest WDK Documentation?

wdkblog — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:57:00 GMT

Hopefully you've already downloaded the new Windows 7 version of the WDK, which has all the latest Windows 7 headers, libraries, samples, and test applications: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx.

We've also released an even later version of the documentation. It has additional topics that we wrote after the rest of the Windows 7 WDK was frozen. A few examples:

· Device and Driver Installation: Device Metadata Packages (three new topics)

· Display: Installing Display Drivers Optimized for Windows 7 and Later

· Network: Wake-on-Wireless LAN

Grab this latest documentation at: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKdocs.mspx#.

To view all the new Windows 7 material, in the Table of Contents click on New Information -> New for Windows 7.

－ Mark Lawler [MSFT], WDK Programming Writer

Should we keep the MSDN Wiki on WDK doc pages?

wdkblog — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:55:00 GMT

If you view WDK docs on MSDN, you probably know that a Wiki feature is available at the bottom of each WDK doc page. This MSDN-provided feature, under the green “Community Content” heading, is meant to encourage MSDN readership to post added value to any MSDN topic.

We enabled this Wiki feature in the WDK docs on MSDN about a year and a half ago. Frankly, at this point we’re questioning the value of this feature to our driver developer audience. So, we’d like your feedback.

Here’s the issue. In theory, MSDN community content is supposed to be a tool by which our customers can add value to our documentation. If you click on the little question mark next to the green “Community Content” heading, you’ll get a pop-up that cites “code samples, tips, undocumented scenarios, links to additional resources” as likely types of contributions.

In reality, what do the community content posts in the WDK docs consist of? In January of 2009, 18 new wiki entries were created:

· Two identified possible doc errors. We opened doc bugs to track these. I’ll leave these comments in place until the docs are fixed, even though wiki guidelines explicitly tell customers that the wiki is not meant for bug reports.

· Four contained managed signatures that one person provided for structures that CDROM storage drivers use when receiving IOCTLs. Here’s an example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms808137.aspx. I left those in place, assuming someone might conceivably write a managed app that sends IOCTLs to a CDROM.

· Six were questions from Windows users (such as “my Drive Ethernet Adapter is not korect is A SiS 9 -- is not prebaring in windows drive so i cannot working with it”) I deleted those because the WDK doc team does not have the resources or mandate to provide free user assistance to the non-driver-development Windows user community.

· Three contained nonsense, which I deleted.

· One contained just a long list of bugcheck codes. I deleted this.

· Two contained entries in a foreign language that I was unable to translate. I deleted these.

January was a pretty typical month. Based on this information, and your own observation of wiki posting in the WDK docs, do you think that wiki posts are adding value to driver developers?

Tell us what you think.

Do you think the WDK doc wiki is useful to the driver writing community?
Are there ways in which we could make the wiki more useful?
Should we get rid of the wiki, or should we keep it?

You can answer these questions by adding a comment to this blog post or by sending us an email at ddksurv1@microsoft.com.

Please know that we definitely want to receive feedback about our documentation from the driver development community. We want to know about documentation errors and holes. The best ways to send us feedback include:

The “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of each doc topic in downloadable docs (not on MSDN).
The “Rate and Give Feedback” link at the top of each MSDN page.

If your answers to the three questions above indicate that you’d like us to continue to provide the WDK doc wiki, we will do so.

— Richard Brown [MSFT], Senior Programming Writer

Open Request for Windows Drive Kit Documentation Feedback

wdkblog — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:59:00 GMT

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]