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Saturday, January 18, 2014

Visual Studio makes it real easy to write drivers

I have heard sometime ago that visual studio now fully supports driver development. Years ago, I found some web resource to modify visual studio settings to make this happen but now that it officially supports driver development, I decided to give it a try.

In order to do this, you will need to install WDK from this msdn web site. Once you install WDK, start up Visual Studio and you will find Driver project when you start new project.
Not just that! In Visual Studio, you can even deploy your own driver to the remote computer!

MSDN also provides some hello world driver to help you to jump start.
Before deploying make sure to enable testsigning on remote computer and restart the remote computer.

However. if you want to do it manually, you will have to first install test certificate and after that right click inf file and click 'install'. That will install and start up your driver.

In case you have trouble installing driver, please check setupapi.dev.log file under C:\Windows\inf folder. If you have to debug your driver, then windbg is your friend.