How to get started with Drivers Programming under windows

Question

Hello all

I want to start learning drivers programming under windows . I never programed drivers , and i am looking for information how to get started .

Any tutorials ,links ,book recommendations , and what development tool kit i should start with ? (WDF will be good one ?)

I really want to program following clock link text

Thanks for your help .

Answer 1

I would start by downloading the windows driver kit (WDK).

Afterwards, you decide which kind of driver you want. FileSystem driver? (probably not), RS-232 driver? usb driver? They all follow different rules and quirks.

The WDK comes with examples drivers for most kinds of drivers and should get you on track fast.

Answer 2

To interact with USB hardware you would be best served by looking at WinUSB or the Usermode Driver Framework. Usermode drivers are orders of magnitude easier, being able to use a C++/COM(kind of) framework and a normal debugging environment.

Writing kernelmode drivers should be reserved for stuff like video card, disk, and other latency/throughput sensitive drivers.

An even easier method would be to use libusb-win32 which is a C library that makes talking to a USB endpoint almost as easy as writing data to a file.

Answer 3

Must see resource for windows driver development, of course as addition to the WDK mentioned by Eric.