Driver Development Tools

Purpose

The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) provides a set of tools that you can use to develop, analyze, build, install, and test your driver. The WDK includes very sophisticated verification tools that are designed to help you detect, analyze, and correct errors in driver code during the development process. Many of these tools can be used very early in the development process where they are most critical and can save you the most time and effort.

What's new

The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) 8.1 is fully integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. The WDK uses the same compiler and build tools that you use to build Visual Studio projects. The code analysis and verification tools can now be easily configured and launched from the Visual Studio development environment, so that you can find and fix problems in your driver source early in the development cycle.

The WDK 8.1 provides a sophisticated driver test framework and a set of device fundamental tests that you can use to automatically build, deploy, and test your driver on remote test systems. The WDK provides the tools to make testing and debugging drivers more convenient and effective than before.

Driver Development Tools Documentation

This section describes the tools and techniques that can help you during development:

Tools for Changing Boot Options for Driver Testing and Debugging

Tools for INF Files

Tools for Building Drivers

Tools for Signing Drivers

Tools for Testing Drivers

Tools for Verifying Drivers

Tools for Software Tracing

Tools for Debugging Drivers

Tools for Device Metadata Packages

Resources

For specific information about building drivers, and using the verification tools and tests in the Visual Studio development environment.

More information and tips for driver developers about using the WDK and the Visual Studio build environment.

Note  The WDK also includes the WsdCodeGen tool. (This tool is also included in the Microsoft Windows SDK.)

This tool automatically generates proxies and stubs based on a Web Services contract. Primarily, you can use this tool to create client applications. However, you can use it for testing or for creating user-mode drivers. For more information about WsdCodeGen, see the Web Services on Devices section of the Windows SDK.