Microsoft Driver Development Conference

Nov 11-14, 2003, Redmond, WA. Hundreds of driver developers met in marathon sessions this week on the Microsoft campus to learn from Microsoft developers and to provide feedback about future directions. WD-3 was there. Just as soon as we get clearance to discuss various things that are nominally covered by NDA, you'll read about them here.

WD-3 Subscription Service Available

In response to reader requests, we've created a subscription service. In keeping with our NONCOMMERCIAL orientation, all we ask for is your e-mail address, and all we'll ever send you are messages telling you when we post new issues. Naturally, you can opt out at any time.

All of our content is free and available to all, whether or not you're a subscriber.

Click here to reach the signup page.

If you're new to the world of driver programming, there's a lot to learn about building drivers. Which DDK do you use? How do you setup your development environment? How do you create the auxiliary files that the DDK build environment depends on? In this article, James Antognini explains all.

Read the whole article

You've probably noticed that if you have the debugger connected to your target system when a crash occurs, the debugger often points you directly to the line of code in your driver that caused the problem. But when you open up the resulting memory dump file, the debugger unhelpfully opens a disassembly window showing a portion of something like KiTrap0E or PspUnhandledExceptionInSystemThread. To make sense of the dump, you need to understand how to interpret the register context in the dump. In this first of a series of articles on kernel debugging, master programmer Jamie Hanrahan shows you how.

Read the whole article

Isochronous transfers on the 1394 bus guarantee timely delivery of data.  Specifically, isochronous transfers are scheduled by the bus so that they occur once every 125 µs.  Isochronous transfers, unlike asynchronous transfers, do not in any way guarantee the integrity of data through a transfer. Isochronous transfers are useful for situations that require a constant data rate but not necessarily data integrity.  Examples include video or audio data transfers.

Read the whole article

This issue: problems with registry DDIs, thread local storage in a DLL, C++ in the kernel, and more...

Sometimes you need to let applications open handles to separately addressable subunits of your device. In this issue's The Architect, learn how to implement a driver namespace for that purpose.