The EWDK goes back to what was really good about the last few releases of the pre-vs-integration WDK
I agree that the EWDK is a good thing. Nobody could argue that.
However, the EWDK is still missing what I valued as the best features of the old (pre-VS-integration) WDK. That is the synchronization of the tool chain with that used to build a given OS release, FREEZING that tool chain in place for the lifetime of a Windows version, and the extensive testing that tool chain received, from end to end, before it found its way into the WDK.
The old WDK included build tools and a compiler and linker that had been tested tens of thousands of times (at least) before release, because it was exercised every day, by every MSFT dev, every time they built something for Windows. And there was ONE actual, specific, guy whose responsibility it was to worry over the features and options in the stable compiler and stable linker, and be certain that those features worked properly to build a working OS (sometimes with secret-sauce in the form of undocumented switches and options, but we’ll ignore this for now). AND there were people who tested the “about-to-be-released” set of OS-version-specific headers/libs with the stable compiler and stable linker to be sure everything worked together, and produced working drivers for Windows.
When a version of Windows was about to be released, the entire tool chain that was used to build that version of Windows was frozen… and THAT was the tool chain that was distributed in the WDK and used to build drivers for that version of Windows forever.
THESE days… you get a random compiler, a random linker, a random set of build tools, and some headers and libs that correspond to SOMEthing I’m sure but I have no idea what. And these tools are improved and gain features at a random rate, and for random reasons. Yes… the EWDK removes this last bit of random change. And that can avoid a source of annoyance and frustration of the “my build environment stopped working sometime between Monday and today” sort, which DOES… I admit… happen frequently.
But when I long for the old days, I long for the long tested, well-proven, One True and Everlasting Tool Chain, for use forever for a given version of Windows.
Peter