Windows driver frameworks source on GitHub

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Yesterday we were thrilled to announce at WinHEC that the source code for the Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF) will be published openly on GitHub. The repo is now live and you can find it at github.com/Microsoft/Windows-Driver-Frameworks.

 

Goal

Our goal with the WDF has always been to make it straightforward to write high-quality drivers.  The frameworks abstract away much of the underlying OS internals without sacrificing flexibility when it’s needed. Combine that with the world-class development environment we’ve enabled with Visual Studio and the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). The end result is a great experience for Windows 10 driver developers.

Still, we understand there’s no substitute for having OS source available. That’s why we’ve published the source behind WDF for anyone to dig through and debug their drivers with. This gives developers transparency into exactly what the framework does as their drivers interact with it. We encourage you to download the source and try stepping through it with the kernel debugger.

Scope

With this initial release, we’ve published the source behind KMDF and UMDF v2. You’ll find that a great deal of the source is shared between the two. Driving the frameworks forward with a unified model is a key priority for WDF the team.

As you experiment with WDF, you may come across undocumented behavior or APIs. We strongly advise against taking dependencies on that behavior as it’s subject to change in future releases. 

If you think of features you’d like to see added or find suspected bugs in the source, we encourage you to file those in the GitHub repo issue tracking. Some of you may be keen on making contributions back to the framework. For the moment, we aren’t accepting contributions via GitHub pull requests. We’re still evaluating that option and it may change in the future.

Samples

We’re also pleased to announce that, like WDF, the collection driver sample projects will now live on GitHub. The set of Windows 8.1 samples on MSDN Code Gallery will stay there for now but all new/updated samples for Windows 10 can be found in github.com/Microsoft/Windows-Driver-Samples.

We believe that making the WDF source available to anyone is a big step forward for Windows hardware enablement. As we continue to roll out new tools, source, and docs, we’re really excited to see the amazing new Windows-enabled devices that you bring to market.

Cheers,

J M Rossy on behalf of the WDF team.