The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is a software toolset from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

that enables the development of

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and o ...

s for the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

platform. It includes documentation, samples, build environments, and tools for driver developers. A complete toolset for driver development also need the following: a compiler

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platfor ...

Windows SDK Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

, and Windows HLK.

History

Previously, the WDK was known as the Driver Development Kit (DDK) and supported

Windows Driver Model In computing, the Windows Driver Model (WDM) also known at one point as the Win32 Driver Model is a framework for device drivers that was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to replace VxD, which was used on older versions of Windows such ...

(WDM) development. It got its current name when Microsoft released

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and added the following previously separated tools to the kit: Installable File System Kit (IFS Kit), Driver Test Manager (DTM), though DTM was later renamed and removed from WDK again. The DDK for Windows 2000 and earlier versions did not include a compiler; instead one had to install Visual C++ separately to compile drivers. From the version for Windows XP the DDK and later the WDK include a command-line compiler to compile drivers. One of the reasons Microsoft gave for including a compiler was that the quality of drivers would improve if they were compiled with the same version of the compiler that was used to compile Windows itself while Visual C++ is targeted to application development and has a different product cycle with more frequent changes. The WDK 8.x and later series goes back to require installing a matched version of

separately, but this time the integration is more complete in that you can edit, build and debug the driver from within Visual Studio directly.

DDK versions

Note: Windows NT DDK, Windows 98 DDK and Windows 2000 DDK are no longer made available by Microsoft because of Java-related settlements made by Microsoft with Sun Microsystems.MSDN: Products Unavailable due to Java-related Settlement
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WDK versions

References

{{MS DevTools Device drivers Microsoft application programming interfaces Microsoft development tools Programming tools for Windows

History

DDK versions

WDK versions

See also

References