March 23, 2006 After being offline for a few days, and inactive for a couple of years, we are trying to breath some life back into WD-3.

At the very least we want to put the excellent material contributed by various Windows driver development experts back into the community.

We'll just have to see where it goes from there.

Our thanks go to Walter Oney, founder of WD-3, for his time and effort in creating WD-3 in the first place.

Thanks, Walter!

Thomas F. Divine, Acting Editor

See You at WinHEC 2006

May 23-25, 2006, Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle, WA.

Details at the Microsoft WinHEC site.

WD-3 Subscription Service No Longer Available

At this point we are breathing some life back into WD-3, but haven't decided whether to support a "subscription service".

We'll just have to see what sort of interest there is in the site from developers like yourself.

This paper describes how you can enable debug trace messages in the network configuration subsystem of the Microsoft� Windows� family of operating systems listed below.

This article is published on NDIS.com.

Read the whole article

Do people whisper behind your back, "he's not computing with all 64 bits, poor fellow"? If so, Thomas will show you how to prove them wrong, at least with respect to your NDIS Intermediate Drivers.

Read the whole article

From a simple and portable way to write Windows drivers for network interface cards, NDIS has grown to Hydra-headed monster with multiple versions, serious platform incompatibilities, and programming rules that normal mortals can't understand. One of the ways you cope with cross-platform issues is by using the many conditional compilation switches that are built-in to NDIS.H. In this article, Netzwerkmeister Wolf explains how to use them. Alles klar!

Read the whole article

The Windows PnP manager uses Device Relations queries  to gather information about the PnP relationships between a given device node and other device nodes in the system. A response to a RemovalRelations query is a declaration by a device node that, if it is removed, some other device node will also be removed. Note that this sort of device node relationship is not the same as a bus driver parent device node/child device node relationship. As a consequence of correctly using Removal Relations, Query Remove operations will be applied to all device nodes related to a specific device node through a Removal Relations query, allowing each such device node to allow or deny the remove operations as appropriate.

Read the whole article

Developer Tool Focus

Mark Roddy has continually updated DDKBuild tool. It now supports integration of the DDK Build process with Visual Studio .NET and provides support for some flavors of Windows Vista.

Visit Mark's DDKBUILD page

Security Notebook

Why it's so important that you check for NULL pointers in certain IRP dispatch routines.

Little Bits

The name speaks for itself...