Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation (Pro Developer) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Penny Orwick, Guy Smith
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Category: Book
List Price: $59.99
Buy New: $13.16
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 36868
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 800
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0735623740
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.446
EAN: 9780735623743
ASIN: 0735623740
Publication Date: April 25, 2007
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New, never read, may have minor wear from being on a retail store shelf.
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Product Description
Get expert insights for the intricacies of the Windows Driver Foundation, based on the Windows Driver Kit. This in-depth reference delivers strategic guidance and practical advice for developing drivers for the Windows platform, helping you reach new levels of proficiency. Code samples in Microsoft Visual C++.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Problematic July 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book may very well describe writing WDF drivers, but it is not necessarily a useful book. It is not the Windows equivalent of the one Writing Linux Device Drivers book, and even that book is only just so useful. First: User-mode drivers are described, but what good are they? They can't do a _lot_ of things, and they are source-code incompatible with kernel-mode drivers. Second: In the book's Forward, a Microsoft "Architect" mentions that 3rd party driver developers find the pre-WDF Windows driver model "complex and difficult to use". Unfortunately neither WDF nor this book has helped me debug real world issues involving Cardbus, inf/driver install failures, and NDIS API failures. Microsoft did _not_ address/document/fix the known "complex and difficult to use" problem.
It's two, maybe three books in one. August 24, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
 Practical, sample-oriented introduction July 23, 2007
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
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 :).
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