Windows Drivers in general act like your typical language translator. A program issue commands to be carried out to the device. But these commands are first relayed to the device driver which then decodes and then recodes it into a digestible format for the device to understand. The following data is then relayed to the device which then carries out the function.
With this article we intend to elucidate the development, testing and deployment of Windows 8 Drivers or Windows Drivers in general. Microsoft Visual Studio is the grand daddy of all driver generation software. The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) 8, the Windows Driver development environment and the Windows debuggers are all integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio. It thus basically has all the wherewithal for coding, building, packaging, deploying, debugging and testing a driver included within it. This is completely different from how it was earlier where we had specific tools for each of these processes and thus had to be performed as separate tasks.
Some differences between Windows Driver Kit 8 and the Microsoft Visual Studio
The WDK 8 makes use of the MSBuild.exe file to build drivers. The MSBuild.exe is also available in Microsoft Visual Studio as both as an interface and as a command line tool. Now the Driver project in WDK 8 makes use of the Sources feature within it. On the other hand Microsoft Visual Studio makes use of both the Sources and Dir files to do the same.
More features in Microsoft Visual Studio
In MVS you can configure the build process so that it automatically creates and signs a driver package. You are given the provision of setting a target computer to check your driver and then automatically set your driver to the target computer every single time you intend to rebuild. The software also lets you establish a kernel-debugging session with a target computer and you are also given the right to choose from an extensive set run-time tests made available. All the above mentioned functions and features let the user to create the right sort of driver for the particular device.
Well with that we come to the end of the article on Microsoft Visual Studio. Hope you now have a rough idea of the different capabilities and functions of the new Microsoft Visual Studio software.
