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Articles
Links to articles of interest to device driver developers.
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This white paper introduces the Universal Printer Driver - UNIDRV. UNIDRV is available on all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 6), including Windows 7.x, Windows 8.x, Windows 10.x and Windows 11.x.
open article
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Tools
Developing drivers for Microsoft™ Windows™ requires Microsoft Visual Studio. Subjects to
the terms of its licensing, you may be able to use the Community Edition at no cost to you. Also required
is the Windows driver kit (WDK), which was formerly known as the Device Driver Kit (DDK). To locate samples
for some classes of devices, you might want to take a look at the older versions of the Windows driver kit.
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Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. In addition to hosting a test editor
and providing build, debug, and deploy support, it also serves as the host environment for building Windows device drivers thanks to
a select set of project templates that take you from zero to sixty in short order.
click for download page
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The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is the one-size-fits-all download and installer for building both user mode and kernel mode device drivers.
Although previous versions have provided a wider range of sample (and starter) drivers, the current WDK boasts the best integration with
the Microsoft Visual Studio environment.
click for wdk download page
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You can download driver kits for Windows 7.x, Windows 8.x, Windows 10.x, and Windows 11. The set of samples included in any given
driver kit reflected the changes that were being introduced for a given type of driver. For that reason, it can be helpful to look
at earlier version of the WDK / DDK when looking for an example of a driver that you are not able to locate in the current WDK.
click for previous wdk version download page
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Whether developing for Microsoft Windows, Linux, or any other environment, no one writes a device driver from scratch. Instead, device driver developers
always start with a sample driver. Finding the optimal starting point for any device driver development project is as much an art as a science. This set of
samples, which Microsoft makes available on github.com, should not be viewed as the definitive statement for best of all possible device drivers. Instead,
it provides one set of samples that allow you to triangulate other samples that you find until you settle on the one to make the basis for your project.
Hint: Check out the DDKs for earlier versions of Microsoft Windows, which might surprise you with the richness of what was released years ago but which
still contains some very useful, and very helpful, samples for your development projects.
click for github driver samples
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The Paul Yao Company, through programming workshops, specializes in providing information and educational services to software engineers.
We believe that knowledge is a two-way proposition, and continually engage in challenging ourselves to learn new skills and augment our engineering abilities.
Our workshops encourage participants, as well as ourselves, to seek solutions by thinking "outside of the box".
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