The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is a software toolset from
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
that enables the development of
device driver
In the context of an operating system, 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, enabli ...
s for the
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
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,
Windows SDK, and
Windows HLK.
History
Previously, the WDK was known as Device Development Kit (DDK) for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x. It supported the development of
VxD drivers. Later versions for Windows NT and Windows 98SE and ME were called Driver Development Kit (DDK) and supported
Windows Driver Model (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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...
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
Visual Studio 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
/ref>
WDK versions
See also
* Windows Driver Frameworks
* Windows Driver Model
* Windows Logo Kit
References
{{MS DevTools
1992 software
Products and services discontinued in 2015
Device drivers
Microsoft application programming interfaces
Microsoft development tools
Programming tools for Windows