Where have you been?!

Well, as you could probably guess, I haven't had much to say for a while for a couple of reasons - first and foremost, the Windows 8 product cycle was really intense.  A lot of changes under the hood came down the pipe, so with the big additions to WDF (UMDF especially) we really had a ton of work to do!  Secondly I really couldn't talk about a lot of what was coming and a lot of the issues I would like to have made topics about I couldn't. :)

But thanks to everybody who provided feedback on the WDK integration with Visual Studio!  I hope those changes that did get in helped, and I know they'll be looking at those other suggestions going forward.  And a big thank you to all who emailed me asking questions.  Hopefully we got your drivers up and running and we look forward to having more driver writers moving over to UMDF, especially now that it supports hardware interrupts!

The last thing for today is - with some sadness, I'm leaving the WDF team and moving over to the Hardware Certification Kits team!  It's a big change for me actually.  I've worked with kernel mode device drivers and technologies since Windows 98 (USB,1394 then to WDF), only venturing outside of kernel mode to write tests cases and 99.99999...% of those were in C/C++.  So this move is actually really exciting as I'll be "forced" to write more using "modern" languages. :)

Not that the blog has been really active for a while for the aforementioned reasons, but I have been getting questions and requests for help during that downtime, so I'm really happy that I (we) were able to provide some help to you guys that  you might not have been able to get elsewhere!  And the biggest impact I think we had (you and I) was there were bugs that we found in the Frameworks along the way and we were able to fix those for UMDF 1.11!

Thanks everybody!  And keep writing those drivers!

 

-patrick