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From: Kid on 13 Apr 2008 09:35
Hi

I see Jungo's WinDriver Toolkit can support Vista and Unix like OS .

Do you think it is worthy of study much more convenient than WDK ?

Is there other good driver Toolkit in the market ?

Thank you .
From: chris.aseltine on 13 Apr 2008 09:50
On Apr 13, 8:35 am, Kid <K...(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

> I see Jungo's WinDriver Toolkit can support Vista and Unix like OS .
>
> Do you think it is worthy of study much more convenient than WDK ?

No.

> Is there other good driver Toolkit in the market ?

No.
From: Bill McKenzie on 15 Apr 2008 00:24
I used to think Jungo's stuff was a total piece of junk. I felt that
because I worked on a far superior toolkit called WinDK that was made by a
company called BlueWater Systems. Nothing compared to WinDK, it was years
ahead of the competition. In fact if WinDK were around today, I would use
it in a heartbeat of KMDF. Unfortunately, the morons who ran a company
called BSquare bought BlueWater (for what reason I could never figure out)
and tried their best to run it into the ground. When WinDK refused to quit
making money, they decided to cut the only division in the whole of BSquare
that actually paid for itself plus a bunch of dead weight they threw into
our group.

Later I worked for a company called Compuware which had bought a Windows
tool company called NuMega which had a debugger called SoftICE and a driver
toolkit called DriverWorks. I hated DriverWorks, but it was mostly a
philosophical problem with the toolkit from my perspective. The code was
pretty solid, but I didn't like the toolkits approach. It hid way too much
detail and was difficult to debug. It doesn't matter now anyway, because I
didn't realize it, but Compuware was just another BSquare. They ran the
NuMega labs into the ground as best they could and then cut everything when
they weren't making "enough" money.

I see KMDF as kind of in a middle ground between those two old frameworks.
Part of me wishes that KMDF had just been a couple of libs to handle PnP and
Power and not much more. The other part of me sees the way the KMDF guys
tackled the driver model, and I like it. Unfortunately, KMDF suffers from a
fatal flaw. It doesn't ship with source. I wouldn't use a toolkit without
source unless I was forced. KMDF is a cool framework, but without source to
me it's useless.

Jungo, as far as I know, suffers from the same flaw. However, at least
Jungo has a bunch of other features to go with the no source code. They
have wizards, tools to help you interrogate your hardware, stuff that all of
the toolkits used to have in one flavor or another, but which KMDF offers
none. It is a true toolkit.

So, if I have to pick a tool I don't like, I guess I would go with the more
full featured??

Personally, I am glad I live in a place and time where I know how to quickly
develop drivers without KMDF, and where KMDF hasn't been forced down my
throat via WHQL or some other means YET.

I am quickly trying to move into driver models which won't likely be
affected by KMDF in the near term. KMDF may yet force me into a management
role :-)

IF, Microsoft ever caught a clue and released source to their framework, it
would probably be worth it for some enterprising folks to release some
wizards and other highly useful tools to go with it. THAT would be the best
toolkit available! But, I doubt that will ever happen.

Just my $0.02 on the whole mess.

Hope this helps.

Bill M.


"Kid" <Kid(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:69DD0777-59C1-41CB-93DF-B75CB3B0707B(a)microsoft.com...
> Hi
>
> I see Jungo's WinDriver Toolkit can support Vista and Unix like OS .
>
> Do you think it is worthy of study much more convenient than WDK ?
>
> Is there other good driver Toolkit in the market ?
>
> Thank you .


From: chris.aseltine on 15 Apr 2008 11:08
On Apr 14, 11:24 pm, "Bill McKenzie" <bkmcken...(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Nothing compared to WinDK, it was years ahead of the
> competition. In fact if WinDK were around today, I would
> use it in a heartbeat of KMDF.

One of our drivers was based on WinDK. It had about 190 PREfast
failures in the library code. I had the true privilege of going and
cleaning them all up.
From: Bill McKenzie on 15 Apr 2008 17:49
Yeah, but how many of those bugs were real? Prefast catches a lot that
either doesn't matter would likely never hit.

AND, you think the DDK samples didn't have just as many before PreFast came
along? Try it against some samples from an old DDK sometime. Keep things
in perspective.

Had PREFast been available we wouild have nailed that down. And 190 for all
that code doesn't seem that bad depending on the bugs.

No one will ever know how many Prefast errors were in or are still in
Jungo's code. Or KMDF :-) I jest, the check in procedures at Microsoft are
fairly strict to say the least.

Bill M.

<chris.aseltine(a)gmail.com> wrote in message
news:9049d887-bbaa-473f-9517-47c7f3907d5d(a)e67g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
> On Apr 14, 11:24 pm, "Bill McKenzie" <bkmcken...(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> Nothing compared to WinDK, it was years ahead of the
>> competition. In fact if WinDK were around today, I would
>> use it in a heartbeat of KMDF.
>
> One of our drivers was based on WinDK. It had about 190 PREfast
> failures in the library code. I had the true privilege of going and
> cleaning them all up.


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