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Windows driver frameworks source on GitHub

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Yesterday we were thrilled to announce at WinHEC that the source code for the Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF) will be published openly on GitHub. The repo is now live and you can find it at github.com/Microsoft/Windows-Driver-Frameworks.

 

Goal

Our goal with the WDF has always been to make it straightforward to write high-quality drivers.  The frameworks abstract away much of the underlying OS internals without sacrificing flexibility when it’s needed. Combine that with the world-class development environment we’ve enabled with Visual Studio and the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). The end result is a great experience for Windows 10 driver developers.

Still, we understand there’s no substitute for having OS source available. That’s why we’ve published the source behind WDF for anyone to dig through and debug their drivers with. This gives developers transparency into exactly what the framework does as their drivers interact with it. We encourage you to download the source and try stepping through it with the kernel debugger.

Scope

With this initial release, we’ve published the source behind KMDF and UMDF v2. You’ll find that a great deal of the source is shared between the two. Driving the frameworks forward with a unified model is a key priority for WDF the team.

As you experiment with WDF, you may come across undocumented behavior or APIs. We strongly advise against taking dependencies on that behavior as it’s subject to change in future releases. 

If you think of features you’d like to see added or find suspected bugs in the source, we encourage you to file those in the GitHub repo issue tracking. Some of you may be keen on making contributions back to the framework. For the moment, we aren’t accepting contributions via GitHub pull requests. We’re still evaluating that option and it may change in the future.

Samples

We’re also pleased to announce that, like WDF, the collection driver sample projects will now live on GitHub. The set of Windows 8.1 samples on MSDN Code Gallery will stay there for now but all new/updated samples for Windows 10 can be found in github.com/Microsoft/Windows-Driver-Samples.

We believe that making the WDF source available to anyone is a big step forward for Windows hardware enablement. As we continue to roll out new tools, source, and docs, we’re really excited to see the amazing new Windows-enabled devices that you bring to market.

Cheers,

J M Rossy on behalf of the WDF team.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2015
    Great news!  This is a big step forward.  Thanks for doing this. The WDF code is under the MIT license, but the sample code does not mention its license.  Could you update the code samples page with its licensing information?  Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    March 19, 2015
    It may not be possible for them to put the samples under one license, as the individual samples already have licenses, mostly "all rights reserved."  It might not be super easy for them to change the license on those.

  • Anonymous
    March 19, 2015
    I see that the LICENSE file has now been added.  Thanks for the quick response!

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2015
    Wow MSFT Team, you rock! Glad to see Microsoft are becoming an open source enthusiast and bring the opportunity to developers to better understand the OS in order to improve the capability of improve the user experience with great products in Windows ecosystem. Congratulations also to the MS Development Team for your efforts.