Building UMDF Drivers

The Windows 8 release of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio and provides a new environment for developing, deploying, testing and debugging drivers.

The Windows 8 WDK uses MSBuild.exe, which is a different build engine from the one used in previous releases of the WDK. Previous releases used Build.exe, which was available in a command-line environment. MSBuild is available both in the Visual Studio user interface and as a command-line tool.

To build a driver that uses User-Mode Driver Framework, you must create a driver project in Visual Studio. For information about developing drivers in Visual Studio, see Developing, Testing, and Deploying Drivers.

Beginning with the Windows 8 WDK, you can build a UMDF driver for an earlier minor version of the library. For example, you could use the Windows 8 WDK to build a driver using UMDF version 1.9 rather than 1.11 so that the driver could be shipped in a package containing an earlier version of the WDF co-installers.

To build a driver for a specific framework version, open the Property Pages for your driver project. Right-click the driver project in Solution Explorer and select Properties. In the Property Pages for the driver, click Configuration Properties, and then Driver Model Settings. Under General, modify UMDF Version Minor.

If you do not modify this value, the MSBuild utility uses the most recent minor version.

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Build date: 4/1/2013