Well, you can kind of see why we’ve been quiet around here…

 

If you’re watching what’s going on at //BUILD (and why wouldn’t you be?), you may have seen that UMDF now supports hardware access (via ports and registers) and interrupt handling!  If you haven’t seen it, you can go read more here.

And the other big one.  Something I’ve been begging to get done for years and believe me in all my years at Microsoft it’s been one of, if not the most, commonly requested thing I’ve heard at all the WinHECs, Developer Conferences, Trade Association meetings, etc from you guys. – Visual Studio integration of the WDK.  Even down to templates for UMDF and KMDF drivers!  You know what that means, native Intellisense (not that we haven’t figured out how to do that already), but more importantly, the one thing I couldn’t give you (partly because I couldn’t get the plug in to work across all VS editions) integrated WDK build support. :D

There are still a couple of other very cool things in the UMDF / KMDF space we’ll get to start talking about pretty soon, and for sure I’ll start digging more in to these two as we move closer to the Windows 8 / WDF 1.11 release timeline.

So the blog will be spooling back up with some fun posts in the coming months.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

 

-p

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    Actually, most of the professional driver developers were saying don't do this, and if you are going to support Visual Studio make sure one can revert to BUILD.  VS has terrible configuration management for projects and I have ironically spent a lot of consulting time converting firms from VS to BUILD for all development since they find that quality soars when the get out of Visual Studio.The current VS integration of the WDK is a disaster since it neither supports XP driver development, or moving out of VS and back to a BUILD environment.  Most clients I have require XP, so basically Microsoft is saying do a ton of parallel maintenance to use the latest tools.  I suspect most of my clients will say ignore Windows 8 and it tools since we can't afford the cost of maintaining the parallel environments.  This is a great way to reduce the quality of WIndows drivers.
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2011
    Glad to hear that this came to fruition, it was a fun project to work on last summer :-).