Developing Device Drivers in Studio 11

Another piece of great news delivered at //build/ has to do with device driver development. Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I posted a series of baby-steps with Windows driver development, and if you’ve read some of that you’d notice that the driver dev work is very different from application development – you use a different build environment, you deploy drivers manually, and you debug them with a different debugger.

This story changes, however, with Visual Studio 11. You can now build drivers in Visual Studio, deploy them to test machines automatically, and debug (in kernel-mode!) using the Visual Studio debugger tool windows and source code debugging support.

First things first – you can create driver projects in Visual Studio using the WDK templates. Even if you don’t want the templates, you can create an empty driver, add your files to it, and then compile it:

By the way, if you want to convert an existing driver, there’s a new option File | Convert Sources which will convert your SOURCES file to a Visual Studio solution. I just tried it out with a simple driver, and sure enough Visual Studio created for me a solution, imported my files, and I was able to compile the driver successfully.

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