As promised at WinHEC, Microsoft has made available the first generally available pre-releases of the Windows 10 WDK and Hardware Lab Kit (WLK). The kits are available here: http://dev.windows.com/en-US/featured/hardware/windows-10-hardware-preview-tools Also available (from the same page) are VS 2015 CTP 6 and the pre-release of the Win10 SDK (both of which you’ll need for the Win 10 […]
Updates to Driver Testing — Not Just for Certification
Long ago, Microsoft created the Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL, pronounced “wickle”) program. The goal of this program was to certify that a particular device and its associated driver met a set of WHQL defined requirements. The requirements could include anything from how the driver was developed (e.g. which driver model it used) to whether […]
New Tools Introduced at WinHEC 2015
Across various presentations at WinHEC, several new tools have been introduced for use by Windows driver writers. There’s no real overarching theme to these tools, they touch different parts of the driver development process and don’t necessarily all target the same audience. However, they’re new and potentially useful, so I thought it worth summarizing them […]
Another Tiny SBC that Runs Windows
If you follow the goings-on in the world of little single board computers (SBCs), you surely noticed last week’s announcement by Qualcomm of the DragonBoard 410C. This ARM-based board includes a 64-bit capable Snapdragon 410 processor, 1GB LPDDR3, and 4GB of eMMC memory. There’s an onb-ard MicroSD slot. It has Bluetooth LE, GPS, and WiFi […]
Windows Everywhere… and Your Driver Too: Universal Drivers
Windows 8 ushered-in a new era of Windows mobile devices, including phones and tablets. Windows 10 promises to converge these systems further, and to extend Windows to even more resource and cost constrained devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Support for x86 and ARM will span all these categories. It seems we really are on the […]
Microsoft Signatures to be REQUIRED for Windows 10 Kernel-Mode Drivers
[25 July 2015: For an update on this topic, with many additional details, please refer to this blog post.] Nobody likes having to sign their 64-bit Windows kernel-mode drivers. But after you’ve done it a few times, you get used to it. And after all, you tell yourself, it’s probably worth it in terms of […]
Windows Source Code on GitHub!
[WDF Source Available: https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-Driver-Frameworks] OK, well, maybe that title was a bit misleading. But, it’s not entirely untrue: portions of the Kernel and User Mode Driver Frameworks are going to be available on GitHub for the benefit of the driver development community. The magnitude of this announcement cannot be understated as it represents a major paradigm shift […]
New MVP Program Announced for Hardware/Driver Devs
Back and the end of January we told you that Microsoft was reviving their interest in community. But I’m not sure anybody saw this particular change coming. During WinHEC Shenzhen 2015, Microsoft introduced a new Most Valuable Professional category, called the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering MVP Program. This category recognizes engineers who develop software for electronic, […]
Welcome to Shenzhen
I’ve blogged previously about how interesting it is that WinHEC is returning, and the significance of its first appearance being in Shenzhen, China. Though I was invited to attend WinHEC this year, I opted not to go. I had been to Shenzhen before. And while the seafood is great and the shopping in next door Hong Kong […]
SAL Annotations: Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful
OK, well, I don’t think anyone is going argue for the beauty of SAL annotations. However, just because they’re hideous to look at doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother with them. In fact, here at OSR one might say we’ve become obsessed with SAL annotations. We find ourselves annotating functions more and more, especially when […]
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