This book provides the technical guidance and understanding needed to
write device drivers for the new Windows 7 Operating System. It takes this
very complex programming development, and shows how the Windows
Driver Framework has greatly simplified this undertaking. It explains the
hardware and software architecture you must understand as a driver developer.
However, it focuses this around the actual development steps one
must take to develop one or the other of the two types of drivers. Thus, this
book’s approach is a very pragmatic one in that it explains the various software
APIs and computer and device hardware based upon our actual
device handler development.
There has been great progress in the art of creating and debugging
device drivers. There is now a great deal of object-oriented design techniques
associated with the driver frameworks that are available to the
device driver developer. Much of the previous grunt work, thank goodness,
is now being handled by the latest device development framework
Windows Driver Foundation (WDF). We will be covering both the user
mode and kernel mode of device driver development. WDF has excellent
submodels contained within it, called the User Mode Driver Framework
and the Kernel Mode Driver Framework.
It is really great to see a Windows Driver Framework involved in the
creation of Windows Device Drivers. I started working with Windows in
1990 and we primarily used the Win32 System APIs to communicate and
control the Windows Operating System for our applications. We used the
Device Driver Kit (DDK) to create the Windows drivers. Because I had
my own company to create application software, I obviously was very concerned
about the time it took to develop application software, and the
robustness of the application. There were more than 2,000 Win32 APIs to
be used for this task.