Programming the Microsoft Windows Driver Model

Chapter 3

Basic Programming Techniques

Writing a WDM driver is fundamentally an exercise in software engineering. Whatever the requirements of your particular hardware, you will combine various elements to form a program. In the preceding chapter, I described the basic structure of a WDM driver, and I showed you two of its elements DriverEntry and AddDevice in detail. In this chapter, I ll focus on the even more basic topic of how you call upon the large body of kernel-mode support routines that the operating system exposes for your use. I ll discuss error handling, memory and data structure management, registry and file access, and a few other topics. I ll round out the chapter with a short discussion of the steps you can take to help debug your driver.