It’s a mighty interesting time to be a driver writer who’s interested in Windows. Those of you who have been doing this for “a long time”, like I have, know that working with Microsoft is a lot like living on a ferris wheel: For a while you’re on the top — Microsoft showers you with interest, […]
Connected standby: It’s Not Just for SOCs Anymore
Why should Windows driver writers care about Connected Standby, and what do they need to know about it? That’s what we’ll tell you in this blog post. What’s happens when you turn your cell phone off? The screen goes blank, but you can still receive email, text messages, and even notices from specific applications that […]
Do As I Say, Not As I Do (article + video)
When we teach classes, whether it’s KMDF, Software Drivers, and Debugging, we always provide our students with a long list of things that are “great ideas” that they should use. Some of these are ideas that make their lives easier as they go about their jobs of developing and maintaining Windows drivers. Others are best […]
Setting the WinDbg Symbol Search Path (article + video)
When people post the output from the WinDbg !analyze -v command to our NTDEV support forum, it’s often useless. The kernel stack doesn’t make sense. And there are banners and error messages saying “the symbols are wrong.” When this happens, the next thing that occurs is often a chorus of replies saying little more than “Fix your symbols and then repost […]
WinHEC Returns!
In the latest concrete demonstration of Microsoft’s return to engagement with the hardware design and driver development community, the long awaited return of WinHEC was announced earlier today in a blog post by Microsoft’s Matt Perry. For those of you who don’t know Matt, he works in Microsoft’s SPiCE (Silicon, Peripheral and Component Enablement) team. It’s […]
What is Arbitrary Thread Context? (article + video)
The concept of “arbitrary thread context” or “arbitrary process and thread context” is often confusing to new Windows driver developers. OSR’s Peter Viscarola clarifies this concept in this video: Here’s what Peter had to say: I’m going to describe what we mean when we say that a particular callback or function is called in an “arbitrary […]
A Second Chance for WPP Tracing (article + video)
As many of you already know, OSR was responsible for introducing WPP Tracing to the world outside Microsoft. When we saw how it was being used internally at Microsoft, we knew it would be valuable to the driver development community. Fortunately, the powers that be agreed! But our love affair with WPP Tracing was to […]
When is a WHILE Not a while?
I have a pretty good life. There are a lot of indicators of this, but one in particular is that I have the luxury of being annoyed by things like the issue that’s the topic of this blog post. I was reading some code from Microsoft the other day, and I noticed that a loop I […]
WDK Visual Studio Integration: A Good or Bad Thing? (Video)
The WDK being integrated into Visual Studio is certainly a big change, but is a good one? Peter and I are asked our opinions on WDK Visual Studio integration all the time, so we decided that it was time to get together and discuss it. Sure, we could have come to a consensus and published an article […]
MSFT Ready To Engage Again With The Broader Driver Dev Community?
There were several comments over on NTDEV about how there was only a single driver related presentation at the just-concluded //Build conference. Frankly, I was surprised there was even one! If you haven’t seen it, you can check out well-know MSFT lead Peter Wieland’s excellent presentation here. In the presentation Peter talks about the coming Shark’s […]
OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.