Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation (Pro Developer) [Paperback]

Penny Orwick (Author), Guy Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735623740 | ISBN-13: 978-0735623743 | Publication Date: April 25, 2007 | Edition: 1

Start developing robust drivers with expert guidance from the teams who developed Windows Driver Foundation. This comprehensive book gets you up to speed quickly and goes beyond the fundamentals to help you extend your Windows development skills. You get best practices, technical guidance, and extensive code samples to help you master the intricacies of the next-generation driver model—and simplify driver development.

Discover how to:

• Use the Windows Driver Foundation to develop kernel-mode or user-mode drivers
• Create drivers that support Plug and Play and power management—with minimal code
• Implement robust I/O handling code
• Effectively manage synchronization and concurrency in driver code
• Develop user-mode drivers for protocol-based and serial-bus-based devices
• Use USB-specific features of the frameworks to quickly develop drivers for USB devices
• Design and implement kernel-mode drivers for DMA devices
• Evaluate your drivers with source code analysis and static verification tools
• Apply best practices to test, debug, and install drivers

PLUS—Get driver code samples on the Web

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Key Book Benefits:

-Provides both strategic and practical advice about how and when to use the Windows Driver Foundation

-Covers both user-mode and kernel-mode driver development

-Includes code samples in Visual C++

About the Author

The authors include members of the Windows Driver Foundation development team, the Windows Hardware Platform Evangelism team, and the Windows Hardware Developer Central team.

Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (April 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735623740
• ISBN-13: 978-0735623743
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #109,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #74 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > Microprocessors & System Design
  • #77 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > PCs

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Practical, sample-oriented introduction, July 23, 2007

By 

Huang Da (WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

This book does exactly what it says, it provides a practical, sample-oriented introduction to developing drivers the Microsoft Windows Driver Foundation way.

The driver code for the samples used in the book, tools needed for developing drivers, and reference documentation are all downloadable (all 2.5GB of it, but it's free) from Microsoft. If you're like me and spend only a small part of your time working on drivers (I'm trying to interface a USB gadget), this is a great guide to WDF as well as to Windows I/O techniques and interface best practices. To get started, you can just hack the samples provided, as the authors intend. WDF looks after plug-n-play and power management, so it makes it easy to develop a basic user-mode USB driver like mine.

If you're a driver specialist, are writing kernel drivers, or have drivers to port from a different operating system, then the book is a detailed reference for moving to WDF. There's a lot of abstraction in the Windows way of doing drivers, and understanding the abstractions helps you write and debug your driver, so this book does a comprehensive job of explaining the relevant abstractions as you go along.

For example, if you're already an expert in the COM programming model, so that it's obvious to you why you need to implement the IUnknown methods, then you can likely skip most of Chapter 18. For the rest of us, we need the how-to advice and the examples, so there's a good reason the book is close to 900 pages :).

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's two, maybe three books in one., August 24, 2007

By 

J. Carbonell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

The content of the book feels more accessible than the online WDK documentation. It does cover the material, but each chapter is divided into three parts: stuff common between the kernel driver framework and user mode driver framework, stuff about the kernel driver framework, and stuff about the user mode driver framework. The authors probably had a hard time organizing the material, but the book should have been structured into those three parts. For example, I'm not currently interested in developing a user mode driver and I found the user mode driver material distracting.

This book is more reference than how-to. Maybe the authors should have structured the book like some of the Linux driver books: develop a real device driver.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book on WDF, but not for learning Windows driver development, December 1, 2010

By 

Jonathan Ludwig "Jonathan" (Utah) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

I found this book well organized and useful for learning the Windows Driver Foundation. This book, however, is not a complete book for learning Windows Driver Development. Unfortunately, the book makes the claim that it is for newbies. This cannot be the case, because it doesn't give much in-depth information about Windows driver and kernel concepts, such as how memory is described (Neither I/O, buffered I/O or MDL's), different execution contexts, IRQL levels and what can and cannot be done in these levels, and basic IRP and I/O Manager concepts. Beginners will still have to start by learning WDM from a book like "Programming the Windows Driver Model". You just can't expect to succeed using WDF if you don't first have a firm grasp on WDM.

I think this book provides an organized approach to learning WDF. It is, however, not a book for leaning Windows driver development basics. I actually thought the book read very well and I'm not a fast reader at all.