DDC/WinHEC

NTDEV
1

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author of
one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author of one
of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down, but apparently
I was not good enough to be selected to attend. Based on the reports I
heard, it would have been a waste of my time and money to have attended, so
it actually worked to my advantage.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided by
their increasingly poor choice of venues. The LA conference center is the
second-worst conference venue I’ve ever been in, exceeded in low quality by
the worst conference venue, New Orleans. The quality of the material seems
to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary keynote addresses,
and no chance for someone to get any breadth because the “tracks” are all
specialized and concurrent. The loss of the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions
and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases the value tremendously.

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an attitude
that can be characterized at best as indifference and at worst as openly
hostile to developers.

The continued failure of anyone to listen to and respond to complaints about
serious defects in the tools, and in fact tell us that these defects are
either intrinsic in the design or “for our own good” suggests that hostility
is used as a defense against what is probably indifference. I no longer
write drivers because I cannot afford the cost or time of the testing
facilities (no one has ever explained why the server cannot also be a domain
server, and there appears to be absolutely no justification for this flawed
decision).

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

Joseph M. Newcomer
FlounderCraft Ltd
610 Kirtland St.
Pittsburgh PA 15208

2

As you’ve gathered, you didn’t miss much. On the other hand, the
registration process could have been handled a lot better.

Part of the problem is that many of us remember what WinHEC was
originally all about. It was a two way opportunity. For device
developers it was about hearing Microsoft’s thoughts on future
Windows enhancements. For Microsoft it was a chance to hear from
those some developers why their chosen method was broken, or perhaps
great ideas, and to have the chance to do something about it.

Both sides got a lot out of it. The other very important point about
this is that the device and kernel developers were brought on board
early enough to influence the next version of Windows. Indeed, part
of the Microsoft philosophy back then was an eagerness to engage and partner.

WinHEC went off course when they brought in more key notes and
created technology 101 tracks so that the marketing suits could also attend.

The original DDC (and the NDIS conference before it) were an attempt
to get back to the roots of WinHEC and it more or less worked. No
marketing suits, just developers able to exchange information and ideas.

Subsequent DDC’s went downhill rapidly, I guess you can associate
that with the general malaise that enveloped Microsoft during the
years of the Vista fiasco. This has permeated the current Microsoft
culture which is generally “not invented here” when you talk to them
about ideas - of course assuming that you have found someone willing
to engage with an outsider. Firstly users were regarded as vermin
and now large sections of Microsoft seem to regard developers as
vermin, too. You could see this in the attitude of the Microsoft
personnel dragged in to the DDC. Perhaps 20% were on board with
re-engaging with the community, 50% were ambivalent and paranoid
about giving away anything they shouldn’t and about 30% wanted
nothing to do with outsiders.

I think that for this DDC, the person who proposed it had the right
idea and their heart in the right place, but the timing was very
wrong. As I said above, WinHEC used to be about early information
and being able to influence Windows technologies. For this last DDC
to have provided that opportunity it needed to have been held 12
months earlier.

By the time the DDC was held there’s already a code freeze on Windows
7. Frankly, that’s about as much use to this community as a one
legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

I really don’t mind signing an NDA, so long as there’s actually some
real information. For this PDC there was nothing worth the NDA, it
was really more like a press embargo as the information (and a whole
lot more) was given out at the PDC and WinHEC. Hell, I note from
some of the WinHEC topics that there were sessions there on
technologies they refused to talk about at the DDC.

What is obvious with regards to these events is that the lawyers have
won. And we all know that when the lawyers win everyone else is a loser.

Cheers,

Mark.

At 18:28 21/11/2008, Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a
co-author of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and
a co-author of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be
turned down, but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to
attend. Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of
my time and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not
aided by their increasingly poor choice of venues. The LA
conference center is the second-worst conference venue I’ve ever
been in, exceeded in low quality by the worst conference venue, New
Orleans. The quality of the material seems to be going downhill;
there are too many (> 0) plenary keynote addresses, and no chance
for someone to get any breadth because the “tracks” are all
specialized and concurrent. The loss of the “birds-of-a-feather”
sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases the value tremendously.

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
worst as openly hostile to developers.

The continued failure of anyone to listen to and respond to
complaints about serious defects in the tools, and in fact tell us
that these defects are either intrinsic in the design or “for our
own good” suggests that hostility is used as a defense against what
is probably indifference. I no longer write drivers because I
cannot afford the cost or time of the testing facilities (no one has
ever explained why the server cannot also be a domain server, and
there appears to be absolutely no justification for this flawed decision).

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

Joseph M. Newcomer

FlounderCraft Ltd

610 Kirtland St.

Pittsburgh PA 15208

3

Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend.

Are you saying you never applied, or that you applied and never heard a
response?

Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time
and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

I disagree; I will summarize shortly.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
by their increasingly poor choice of venues. …The quality of the
material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary
keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth
because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of
the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases
the value tremendously.

The people on this list are not necessarily the target audience for
WinHEC. It’s aimed mostly at hardware managers, big OEMs, vice
presidents, the press, and other technical decision makers, not at
developers. That’s why we have the DDC.

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
worst as openly hostile to developers.

That’s nonsense. I was going to keep quiet about this thread, but I
have to speak up. Now, I understand that both Don and you are
inherently negative people, and that negativity colors your responses to
a very great degree, but I want to make sure that the other people who
read this also understand where you’re coming from.

I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
“guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”

There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
presented real information about how their tools were created, what
pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
valuable? No, of course not.

When you’ve been writing storage drivers for 15 years, it is entirely
unrealistic to expect that you can attend a storage session at a DDC and
receive 90 minutes jam-packed with brand-new and exciting information.
Of COURSE most of it is going to be review. How could it not be?
There’s just not that much new information. The best you can expect is
to learn a few good tidbits here and there, to present your key issues
to people who care, to make a few good contacts, and to commiserate with
others who are in the same boat. THAT’S what the DDC provided, and it
did so excellently.

Some people are never satisfied. When you went to your first amusement
park, it was probably a magical experience for you, filled with wonder.
But after you’ve been to 6 or 7 amusement parks, the magic is gone.
Does that make the visit useless?

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

I’m not sure who asked you to care.

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

4

See below…

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 2:10 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend.

Are you saying you never applied, or that you applied and never heard a
response?
*****
I applied and received no response.
*****

Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time
and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

I disagree; I will summarize shortly.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
by their increasingly poor choice of venues. …The quality of the
material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary
keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth
because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of
the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases
the value tremendously.

The people on this list are not necessarily the target audience for
WinHEC. It’s aimed mostly at hardware managers, big OEMs, vice
presidents, the press, and other technical decision makers, not at
developers. That’s why we have the DDC.
****
Yes, but the DDC has been largely a waste of time. As someone earlier
observed, it used to be about communication; it now seems to be about
Microsoft telling us how we are going to work, and please shut up kids, we
know best.
****

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
worst as openly hostile to developers.

That’s nonsense. I was going to keep quiet about this thread, but I
have to speak up. Now, I understand that both Don and you are
inherently negative people, and that negativity colors your responses to
a very great degree, but I want to make sure that the other people who
read this also understand where you’re coming from.
****
Actually, I’m inherently positive. But after a while, even I get the
message that feedback is unwelcome.
****

I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
“guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”
****
That would surprise me. What I want to know are important questions about
tooling, and why the tooling continues to go downhill in a number of ways.
Why we get poor documentation, documentation from which critical functions
have been removed (apparently, nobody need to know how the old DDI call
worked in the old driver, and we are magically supposed to intuit how it
worked so we can convert it to the new DDI call which has different
parameters), documentation which is inconsistent with the actual
implementation, tools that are poorly documented or undocumented, tools that
don’t work, tools that are “improved” by adding features that contribute
either zero or negative while existing long-term bugs in those same tools
are NOT being fixed, and other things rather important to those of us who
actually have to figure out what is going on.

I’m handed an old NT4 driver and asked “What do we have to do to this to
make it work under (2000, XP, Vista)?” and I can’t even figure out what it
does because the calls it uses have not only been deprecated but removed
from the documentation! This is why I keep a stack of DDK disks around, so
I can install an old DDK just to read the documentation. But why isn’t the
documentation available in the release DDK?

Why is the truth about PnP and Power states not documented? Why are we told
we don’t need to know it because “WDK solves everything”? Has it occurred
to anyone that companies, especially small companies, do not have the
resources to rewrite complex drivers just because it “feels good”? The fact
that the last time I looked at the DKK, not a single driver was written in
KMDF, is an example of Real World Drivers. Yet there is no support.

Where is the promised KMDF source?

Why can’t I use an existing server to run tests? I don’t want excuses; I
want a DETAILED TECHNICAL JUSTIFICATION, not something that turns out to be
“we felt like doing it that way”.

How about a debugger that actually works and is usable? Watch a new user
try to figure out why the dialog box indicating an error pops up UNDER the
command window and you will understand. Try reading code and output when it
is tiled vertically.

So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm, fuzzy feelings
when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?
*****

There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
presented real information about how their tools were created, what
pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
valuable? No, of course not.

When you’ve been writing storage drivers for 15 years, it is entirely
unrealistic to expect that you can attend a storage session at a DDC and
receive 90 minutes jam-packed with brand-new and exciting information.
Of COURSE most of it is going to be review. How could it not be?
There’s just not that much new information. The best you can expect is
to learn a few good tidbits here and there, to present your key issues
to people who care, to make a few good contacts, and to commiserate with
others who are in the same boat. THAT’S what the DDC provided, and it
did so excellently.
****
I have not been writing storage drivers for 15 years. But I can’t attend
the storage driver sessions because I have to attend some other session
which has even more immediate utility to me. Not at WinHEC, not at DDC.

Not that it mattered, because I was not accepted.
****

Some people are never satisfied. When you went to your first amusement
park, it was probably a magical experience for you, filled with wonder.
But after you’ve been to 6 or 7 amusement parks, the magic is gone.
Does that make the visit useless?
****
I don’t spend over $2500 (counting hotel, air fair, car rental, and
registration fee) to go to the amusement park. I need to get that much out
of the conference or it is a waste of time and money, because during that
week I not only put out $2500 in raw expenses, I lose a week of billable
time, which means it is actually vastly more expensive. It is not
cost-effective.
****

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

I’m not sure who asked you to care.
****
Ideally, Microsoft thinks I should care. I don’t care if you ask me to
care.
****

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

–
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

5

[OT, somewhat nostalgic, and definitely not at all useful]

For me the hardest part of these recent threads is that every time I hear “first DDC” I want to get pedantic and point out I was a speaker at the first DDC [my staff badge, which is a simple plastic sheath for a 4 x 6 card with an elastic cord maybe 1/8 inch in diameter anchored to it, is hanging on my office door]. It was held in Anaheim 16 years ago [only one “official” Hotel- Disneyland, of course], and it is not the Johnny-come-lately one you are all calling the “first DDC”. It’s certainly the only time I remember having lunch with Darryl Havens. We were trying to educate the developer community about the brand-spanking new NT 3.1 driver models [some things never change]. Even tough newfangled concepts like a 32-bit flat memory space that didn’t have segmentation issues every which way you turned.

Na-na-na-na-na.

[Written from somewhere inside my personal reality distortion field, of course]

Bob Kjelgaard
Sr SDET | Windows Driver Frameworks QA

6

Working with Microsoft back in those days was fun !!

I didn’t go to that event, but was working with the network group
that presented BillG with TCP/IP as an alternative to the dial-up
networking model.

Those guys knew how to party :wink:

At 20:07 21/11/2008, xxxxx@microsoft.com wrote:

[OT, somewhat nostalgic, and definitely not at all useful]

For me the hardest part of these recent threads is that every time I
hear “first DDC” I want to get pedantic and point out I was a
speaker at the first DDC [my staff badge, which is a simple plastic
sheath for a 4 x 6 card with an elastic cord maybe 1/8 inch in
diameter anchored to it, is hanging on my office door]. It was held
in Anaheim 16 years ago [only one “official” Hotel- Disneyland, of
course], and it is not the Johnny-come-lately one you are all
calling the “first DDC”. It’s certainly the only time I remember
having lunch with Darryl Havens. We were trying to educate the
developer community about the brand-spanking new NT 3.1 driver
models [some things never change]. Even tough newfangled concepts
like a 32-bit flat memory space that didn’t have segmentation issues
every which way you turned.

Na-na-na-na-na.

[Written from somewhere inside my personal reality distortion field,
of course]

Bob Kjelgaard
Sr SDET | Windows Driver Frameworks QA

7

I agree that it would have been better to have the DDC earlier. The ability to provide input earlier on in the development process (before features are frozen) is, IMO, important, and it’s under NDA anyway, so one would hope that this would satisfy that legal folks.

I get the feeling that this latest DDC was kind of thrown together at the last minute internally at Microsoft, along the lines of “Whoops, it’s been a long time since we last had a DDC, let’s put one together before WinHEC” without enough time to get all of the various administrivia and timing arrangements really fleshed out. The fact that sessions weren’t even listed until almost just before is kind of evidence of that too. In that vein, I suspect that the various administrative failings (us STILL not having our DDC content, DDC invitation screwups, and soforth) are probably more reflective of a hastily-assembled last-minute conference than anything else.

  • S

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 2:10 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend.

Are you saying you never applied, or that you applied and never heard a
response?

Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time
and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

I disagree; I will summarize shortly.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
by their increasingly poor choice of venues. …The quality of the
material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary
keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth
because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of
the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases
the value tremendously.

The people on this list are not necessarily the target audience for
WinHEC. It’s aimed mostly at hardware managers, big OEMs, vice
presidents, the press, and other technical decision makers, not at
developers. That’s why we have the DDC.

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
worst as openly hostile to developers.

That’s nonsense. I was going to keep quiet about this thread, but I
have to speak up. Now, I understand that both Don and you are
inherently negative people, and that negativity colors your responses to
a very great degree, but I want to make sure that the other people who
read this also understand where you’re coming from.

I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
“guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”

There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
presented real information about how their tools were created, what
pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
valuable? No, of course not.

When you’ve been writing storage drivers for 15 years, it is entirely
unrealistic to expect that you can attend a storage session at a DDC and
receive 90 minutes jam-packed with brand-new and exciting information.
Of COURSE most of it is going to be review. How could it not be?
There’s just not that much new information. The best you can expect is
to learn a few good tidbits here and there, to present your key issues
to people who care, to make a few good contacts, and to commiserate with
others who are in the same boat. THAT’S what the DDC provided, and it
did so excellently.

Some people are never satisfied. When you went to your first amusement
park, it was probably a magical experience for you, filled with wonder.
But after you’ve been to 6 or 7 amusement parks, the magic is gone.
Does that make the visit useless?

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

I’m not sure who asked you to care.

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

8

> -----Original Message-----

From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of
Joseph M. Newcomer
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 8:53 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm,
fuzzy feelings
when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?

I can’t believe I’m going to defend MS but above is unfair.

Have you noticed the thread regarding documentation sooner this week?
I’d say they are trying to improve docs and don’t see it as serious
inconvenience. I used feedback link in WDK docs several times in the
past and to all but one request got ‘will be fixed’ response. The last
one was more complicated than a text change or adding a topic and the
response was ‘will be investigated’. In this thread they confirmed they
will make requested improvement.

Best regards,

Michal Vodicka
UPEK, Inc.
[xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]

9

The practice of removing old documentation was halted with the Windows 2000 DDK, according to the doc team thread here.

  • S

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Joseph M. Newcomer
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 2:53 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

See below…

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 2:10 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend.

Are you saying you never applied, or that you applied and never heard a
response?
*****
I applied and received no response.
*****

Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time
and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

I disagree; I will summarize shortly.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
by their increasingly poor choice of venues. …The quality of the
material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary
keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth
because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of
the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases
the value tremendously.

The people on this list are not necessarily the target audience for
WinHEC. It’s aimed mostly at hardware managers, big OEMs, vice
presidents, the press, and other technical decision makers, not at
developers. That’s why we have the DDC.
****
Yes, but the DDC has been largely a waste of time. As someone earlier
observed, it used to be about communication; it now seems to be about
Microsoft telling us how we are going to work, and please shut up kids, we
know best.
****

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
worst as openly hostile to developers.

That’s nonsense. I was going to keep quiet about this thread, but I
have to speak up. Now, I understand that both Don and you are
inherently negative people, and that negativity colors your responses to
a very great degree, but I want to make sure that the other people who
read this also understand where you’re coming from.
****
Actually, I’m inherently positive. But after a while, even I get the
message that feedback is unwelcome.
****

I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
“guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”
****
That would surprise me. What I want to know are important questions about
tooling, and why the tooling continues to go downhill in a number of ways.
Why we get poor documentation, documentation from which critical functions
have been removed (apparently, nobody need to know how the old DDI call
worked in the old driver, and we are magically supposed to intuit how it
worked so we can convert it to the new DDI call which has different
parameters), documentation which is inconsistent with the actual
implementation, tools that are poorly documented or undocumented, tools that
don’t work, tools that are “improved” by adding features that contribute
either zero or negative while existing long-term bugs in those same tools
are NOT being fixed, and other things rather important to those of us who
actually have to figure out what is going on.

I’m handed an old NT4 driver and asked “What do we have to do to this to
make it work under (2000, XP, Vista)?” and I can’t even figure out what it
does because the calls it uses have not only been deprecated but removed
from the documentation! This is why I keep a stack of DDK disks around, so
I can install an old DDK just to read the documentation. But why isn’t the
documentation available in the release DDK?

Why is the truth about PnP and Power states not documented? Why are we told
we don’t need to know it because “WDK solves everything”? Has it occurred
to anyone that companies, especially small companies, do not have the
resources to rewrite complex drivers just because it “feels good”? The fact
that the last time I looked at the DKK, not a single driver was written in
KMDF, is an example of Real World Drivers. Yet there is no support.

Where is the promised KMDF source?

Why can’t I use an existing server to run tests? I don’t want excuses; I
want a DETAILED TECHNICAL JUSTIFICATION, not something that turns out to be
“we felt like doing it that way”.

How about a debugger that actually works and is usable? Watch a new user
try to figure out why the dialog box indicating an error pops up UNDER the
command window and you will understand. Try reading code and output when it
is tiled vertically.

So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm, fuzzy feelings
when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?
*****

There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
presented real information about how their tools were created, what
pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
valuable? No, of course not.

When you’ve been writing storage drivers for 15 years, it is entirely
unrealistic to expect that you can attend a storage session at a DDC and
receive 90 minutes jam-packed with brand-new and exciting information.
Of COURSE most of it is going to be review. How could it not be?
There’s just not that much new information. The best you can expect is
to learn a few good tidbits here and there, to present your key issues
to people who care, to make a few good contacts, and to commiserate with
others who are in the same boat. THAT’S what the DDC provided, and it
did so excellently.
****
I have not been writing storage drivers for 15 years. But I can’t attend
the storage driver sessions because I have to attend some other session
which has even more immediate utility to me. Not at WinHEC, not at DDC.

Not that it mattered, because I was not accepted.
****

Some people are never satisfied. When you went to your first amusement
park, it was probably a magical experience for you, filled with wonder.
But after you’ve been to 6 or 7 amusement parks, the magic is gone.
Does that make the visit useless?
****
I don’t spend over $2500 (counting hotel, air fair, car rental, and
registration fee) to go to the amusement park. I need to get that much out
of the conference or it is a waste of time and money, because during that
week I not only put out $2500 in raw expenses, I lose a week of billable
time, which means it is actually vastly more expensive. It is not
cost-effective.
****

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

I’m not sure who asked you to care.
****
Ideally, Microsoft thinks I should care. I don’t care if you ask me to
care.
****

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

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10

Michal,

I’ve used the feedback link when it first came out and got no
response. Before the feedback link I used the beta bug submitals, and got
no response (and then had the bug closed “by design” a week before the end
of testing, even on bugs that were definitely not by design). So I have a
very negative view of feedback for doc.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

“Michal Vodicka” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of
> Joseph M. Newcomer
> Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 8:53 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: RE: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC
>
> So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm,
> fuzzy feelings
> when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
> documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?

I can’t believe I’m going to defend MS but above is unfair.

Have you noticed the thread regarding documentation sooner this week?
I’d say they are trying to improve docs and don’t see it as serious
inconvenience. I used feedback link in WDK docs several times in the
past and to all but one request got ‘will be fixed’ response. The last
one was more complicated than a text change or adding a topic and the
response was ‘will be investigated’. In this thread they confirmed they
will make requested improvement.

Best regards,

Michal Vodicka
UPEK, Inc.
[xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]

11

More to the point for me, though, is that this sort of feedback is rather disturbing. I know we put forth a lot of effort to improve our tools, improve our communications and to improve these conferences.

I have tools in the WDK. I know they have deficiencies [and some of them are even of the boneheaded, “how the hell could you have missed this?” variety]. When I find them myself, I fix them. When somebody tells me about them, I fix them. When someone asks me for an explanation, I give it. I try to make sure the explanation is acceptable, but often I get no response at all to the explanation. Was it good, or did they just decide for some unforeseeable [to me, anyway] reason that I’m just another one of those arrogant bastards who doesn’t actually give a damn? Or was it totally unintelligible and they decided it wasn’t worth getting an answer from me? Or what other possibility? I don’t know- how am I supposed to find out? Silence it utterly ambiguous.

That’s why we value feedback.

I’ve had people try to tell me that I [or the WDF team] am /are somehow different in this regard, but I know we are not. There are plenty of people on this campus who are willing to engage with you and attempt to understand and if they can, resolve your problems. Now perhaps every team doesn’t have them [I’m not omniscient enough to know], but I personally feel that’s not for lack of trying [those aren’t the kind of people we try to hire here]. The kind of response you describe coming from here is definitely not encouraged nor highly regarded.

I’m not even trying to say it’s all sunshine and light or that we never screw something up, or even that our social skills are all so great that you’ll get an expected response. Nor am I denying that sometimes someone gets fed up and says something they perhaps shouldn’t [I may now be a case in point].

But we are [in terms of doing better by the driver development community, and for that matter by end users and the rest of our customers] trying to do this right- I’m as certain of that as I could be.

12

“Tim Roberts” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
> expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
> years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
> content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
> tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
> times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
> much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
> would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
> management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
> “guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
> 10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”
>
> There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
> presented real information about how their tools were created, what
> pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
> what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
> from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
> every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
> feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
> valuable? No, of course not.

Sorry every Microsoft conference I have been to except WinHEC 2007 and DDC
2008,
contained one of the following for me:

1. A new presentation on something of interest

2. A repeat presentation that was presented with a new angle that
got me thinking about things differently

3. A presentation on something new and significant in a comming
OS.

I was looking for an hour or two of goodness out of 3 days, I did not get
that, and got repeat presentations (the worst being security slides that had
typos at WinHEC 6 years ago when first presented, were fixed as subsequent
WinHEC’s and had the typos back in for this DDC!)

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

13

BTW, I was just reminded that the 1992 DDC I referred to earlier was the second one- first was about a year earlier [IIRC] and local- so I didn’t attend the first, after all.

14

Don,

when it was? Things change and sometimes even go better :slight_smile:

They told us at MVP summit at spring there may be no response but all
feedback is read and processed once per month. So I was a bit surprised
when received responses within few days now. It was for Win7 WDK if it
makes a difference.

BTW, I had very negative experience with Vista beta testing. All bugs I
reported remained untouched for months and then suddenly all were closed
within few days as ‘not reproducible’. Of course, after RTM I had to
open support requests for the same bugs and some weren’t fixed until
SP1. Still, I will report Win7 bugs in a hope they will take beta
testing more seriously now.

Best regards,

Michal Vodicka
UPEK, Inc.
[xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Don Burn
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 9:44 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re:[ntdev] DDC/WinHEC

Michal,

I’ve used the feedback link when it first came out and got no
response. Before the feedback link I used the beta bug
submitals, and got
no response (and then had the bug closed “by design” a week
before the end
of testing, even on bugs that were definitely not by design).
So I have a
very negative view of feedback for doc.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

“Michal Vodicka” wrote in message
> news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> > [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of
> > Joseph M. Newcomer
> > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 8:53 PM
> > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> > Subject: RE: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC
> >
> > So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm,
> > fuzzy feelings
> > when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
> > documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?
>
> I can’t believe I’m going to defend MS but above is unfair.
>
> Have you noticed the thread regarding documentation sooner this week?
> I’d say they are trying to improve docs and don’t see it as serious
> inconvenience. I used feedback link in WDK docs several times in the
> past and to all but one request got ‘will be fixed’ response. The last
> one was more complicated than a text change or adding a topic and the
> response was ‘will be investigated’. In this thread they
> confirmed they
> will make requested improvement.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Michal Vodicka
> UPEK, Inc.
> [xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]
>
>
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online
> at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

15

I suspect that most of us when we refer to the first DDC mean DDC 2003, we
stand corrected (I guess this makes it the third DDC).

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

“Bob Kjelgaard” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
BTW, I was just reminded that the 1992 DDC I referred to earlier was the
second one- first was about a year earlier [IIRC] and local- so I didn’t
attend the first, after all.

16

DDC/WinHECFor me, I found it very useful. I got to meet many members of the NDIS team and learn about the changes that will have an impact on the drivers I write/maintain. I also learned about some of the new features they want supported and reasons for those features. It is not complete and as useful as being invited by a specific group to work in their building as I have had happen in the past, but it did get me some benefit. As we are designing new chips all the time, I learned where we may have to make changes in the hardware. I could provide my input to the chip designers’ management so they can understand things we will need to support to keep our customer base (OEMs). We don’t do retail, but only sell to OEMs who put our chips in their systems.

I also got to meet some of the folks from WDF to see how serious they have become at getting it adopted in other types of hardware, but my first priority since my company paid for the trip was NDIS. I also got to hear about additions to some of the tools to support NDIS where they were never supported. I suspect some of the details are now open, but I am avoiding mentioning any specifics because of the NDA.

I have been in file systems in the past, but not currently and that area was not covered at the DDC in any substantial way. The IFS PlugFest is the usual venue for that area, but I missed not having it at the DDC. That is mostly a personal comment and I do understand why it was not a part of the DDC.

Another good thing from the DDC was more information and people from Microsoft who are participating in the newsgroups, including these hosted by OSR. I encouraged some of the Microsoft folks to continue to provide answers because there are no new books being written about Windows Device Drivers other than those Microsoft wants to highlight new things such as the WDF and windbg books. Recently Amazon canceled an order I had for the 5th edition of the Windows Internals book because it delayed. From what I have heard, no author makes any money writing books about device drivers much less about a specific class of device drivers such as NDIS, video, or audio. The audience is far too small or the price would be prohibitive if an author was to get a large enough royalty to make it worthwhile.

“Joseph M. Newcomer” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down, but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend. Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.

Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided by their increasingly poor choice of venues. The LA conference center is the second-worst conference venue I’ve ever been in, exceeded in low quality by the worst conference venue, New Orleans. The quality of the material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases the value tremendously.

As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at worst as openly hostile to developers.

The continued failure of anyone to listen to and respond to complaints about serious defects in the tools, and in fact tell us that these defects are either intrinsic in the design or “for our own good” suggests that hostility is used as a defense against what is probably indifference. I no longer write drivers because I cannot afford the cost or time of the testing facilities (no one has ever explained why the server cannot also be a domain server, and there appears to be absolutely no justification for this flawed decision).

So I wonder why I am supposed to care.

Joseph M. Newcomer

FlounderCraft Ltd

610 Kirtland St.

Pittsburgh PA 15208

17

I don’t have access to the bits I want from Win7 (for intstance WDK, this is
why I asked the other question today) so I cannot say. I do know this was
the case with Server 2008 no response or fixes. What annoys me is that
some of these have caused people to make bad early design decisions that in
the end have produced poor drivers containing things that cause crashes on
Windows. And I lay these crashes back on the WDK doc team.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

“Michal Vodicka” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
Don,

when it was? Things change and sometimes even go better :slight_smile:

They told us at MVP summit at spring there may be no response but all
feedback is read and processed once per month. So I was a bit surprised
when received responses within few days now. It was for Win7 WDK if it
makes a difference.

BTW, I had very negative experience with Vista beta testing. All bugs I
reported remained untouched for months and then suddenly all were closed
within few days as ‘not reproducible’. Of course, after RTM I had to
open support requests for the same bugs and some weren’t fixed until
SP1. Still, I will report Win7 bugs in a hope they will take beta
testing more seriously now.

Best regards,

Michal Vodicka
UPEK, Inc.
[xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Don Burn
> Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 9:44 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re:[ntdev] DDC/WinHEC
>
> Michal,
>
> I’ve used the feedback link when it first came out and got no
> response. Before the feedback link I used the beta bug
> submitals, and got
> no response (and then had the bug closed “by design” a week
> before the end
> of testing, even on bugs that were definitely not by design).
> So I have a
> very negative view of feedback for doc.
>
>
> –
> Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
> Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
> Website: http://www.windrvr.com
> Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
> Remove StopSpam to reply
>
>
> “Michal Vodicka” wrote in message
> news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> > [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of
> > Joseph M. Newcomer
> > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 8:53 PM
> > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> > Subject: RE: [ntdev] DDC/WinHEC
> >
> > So how is it I’m supposed to remain optimistic and get warm,
> > fuzzy feelings
> > when the simplest tools aren’t working and the production of usable
> > documentation is considered a serious inconvenience to Microsoft?
>
> I can’t believe I’m going to defend MS but above is unfair.
>
> Have you noticed the thread regarding documentation sooner this week?
> I’d say they are trying to improve docs and don’t see it as serious
> inconvenience. I used feedback link in WDK docs several times in the
> past and to all but one request got ‘will be fixed’ response. The last
> one was more complicated than a text change or adding a topic and the
> response was ‘will be investigated’. In this thread they
> confirmed they
> will make requested improvement.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Michal Vodicka
> UPEK, Inc.
> [xxxxx@upek.com, http://www.upek.com]
>
>
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online
> at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

18

I’m not sure that this situation has all that much to do with lawyers making policy, as much as them
implementing a systemic program driven policy of non-disclosure that is somehow supposed to improve
the deliverable.

In my personal opinion, speaking for no one else, this is really not a case of us v. msft.
Insufficient granularity. The thing is, if you want to prevent a group of people from knowing X, Y
and/or Z, then in you have to put in place controls on the those who know X, Y and/or Z, and that’s
a lot more intrusive, onerous, counterproductive, binding and probably lame than signing an NDA.
It’s not just we that are having our lives made needlessly (in my opinion) more
difficult/unpleasant/tedious/silly. The trenches on both sides of this one are affected; no doubt
if you’re the Czar, it’s probably great, and all the meta-managing of the communication void is
probably a good gig as well.

At the end of the day, these people all have jobs and rules within which they have to live, and it
presently appears that the law of the land is to not tell anyone anything. I doesn’t make any sense
to me, but so what, and when all is said and done, I really don’t care all that much what I am or am
not told, as I spend most of my time reverse engineering things. So on that score, I really don’t
have an issue with msft, though it’s not what I would choose, were it my choice.

I guess what I really wanted to say is that I don’t feel that I’m being shut out by the handful of
people that I know at msft. Far from it - it is what it is, they do what they can, when they can,
not to mention put up my shit, even when I get narrow, as well as with my long salty e-mails, and
for all that I am appreciative, and along the way, I usually enjoy myself.

Now, I’m not saying that is this the cause of the whole community state. No sir. Not even close.
There’s the other side of the coin, which is that what they do share in some cases is basically
propaganda that some there insist is actually what we need & want, even if we don’t have the good
sense to know it ourselves. If they could just lose the large and growing number of people who feel
it is their job to tell us what we want, that would make me very happy. Until they have some
competition, that’s a lost cause, because those that do this don’t appear to even know that we
exist, because their battles are internal, because we have to deal with it, no matter what it is, so
why worry about it, especially since unless it’s MSFT Bob, it ain’t going to get killed in any sort
of reasonable time frame.

mm

Mark S. Edwards wrote:

As you’ve gathered, you didn’t miss much. On the other hand, the
registration process could have been handled a lot better.

Part of the problem is that many of us remember what WinHEC was
originally all about. It was a two way opportunity. For device
developers it was about hearing Microsoft’s thoughts on future Windows
enhancements. For Microsoft it was a chance to hear from those some
developers why their chosen method was broken, or perhaps great ideas,
and to have the chance to do something about it.

Both sides got a lot out of it. The other very important point about
this is that the device and kernel developers were brought on board
early enough to influence the next version of Windows. Indeed, part of
the Microsoft philosophy back then was an eagerness to engage and partner.

WinHEC went off course when they brought in more key notes and created
technology 101 tracks so that the marketing suits could also attend.

The original DDC (and the NDIS conference before it) were an attempt to
get back to the roots of WinHEC and it more or less worked. No
marketing suits, just developers able to exchange information and ideas.

Subsequent DDC’s went downhill rapidly, I guess you can associate that
with the general malaise that enveloped Microsoft during the years of
the Vista fiasco. This has permeated the current Microsoft culture
which is generally “not invented here” when you talk to them about ideas

  • of course assuming that you have found someone willing to engage with
    an outsider. Firstly users were regarded as vermin and now large
    sections of Microsoft seem to regard developers as vermin, too. You
    could see this in the attitude of the Microsoft personnel dragged in to
    the DDC. Perhaps 20% were on board with re-engaging with the community,
    50% were ambivalent and paranoid about giving away anything they
    shouldn’t and about 30% wanted nothing to do with outsiders.

I think that for this DDC, the person who proposed it had the right idea
and their heart in the right place, but the timing was very wrong. As I
said above, WinHEC used to be about early information and being able to
influence Windows technologies. For this last DDC to have provided that
opportunity it needed to have been held 12 months earlier.

By the time the DDC was held there’s already a code freeze on Windows
7. Frankly, that’s about as much use to this community as a one legged
man in an ass-kicking contest.

I really don’t mind signing an NDA, so long as there’s actually some
real information. For this PDC there was nothing worth the NDA, it was
really more like a press embargo as the information (and a whole lot
more) was given out at the PDC and WinHEC. Hell, I note from some of
the WinHEC topics that there were sessions there on technologies they
refused to talk about at the DDC.

What is obvious with regards to these events is that the lawyers have
won. And we all know that when the lawyers win everyone else is a loser.

Cheers,

Mark.

At 18:28 21/11/2008, Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

> I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
> of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
> of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
> but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend. Based
> on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time and
> money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.
>
> Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
> by their increasingly poor choice of venues. The LA conference center
> is the second-worst conference venue I?ve ever been in, exceeded in
> low quality by the worst conference venue, New Orleans. The quality
> of the material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0)
> plenary keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any
> breadth because the ?tracks? are all specialized and concurrent. The
> loss of the ?birds-of-a-feather? sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC
> decreases the value tremendously.
>
> As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
> attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
> worst as openly hostile to developers.
>
> The continued failure of anyone to listen to and respond to complaints
> about serious defects in the tools, and in fact tell us that these
> defects are either intrinsic in the design or ?for our own good?
> suggests that hostility is used as a defense against what is probably
> indifference. I no longer write drivers because I cannot afford the
> cost or time of the testing facilities (no one has ever explained why
> the server cannot also be a domain server, and there appears to be
> absolutely no justification for this flawed decision).
>
> So I wonder why I am supposed to care.
>
> *Joseph M. Newcomer
> *
> *FlounderCraft Ltd
> *
> *610 Kirtland St.
> *
> *Pittsburgh PA 15208
> *

19

Tim,

I should have also mentioned that every presenter I queried at this
DDC stated they had a 200 level presentation that management decided to
inflate the number to 400. Sorry this is false advertising at its worst, I
do not blame the developers who presented, I blame the organizers who pushed
through this stuff when there was not enough significant material to justify
the conference. I know of at least one person who had set his yearly goal
for this year to have a DDC, which is stupid since the material was not
there, and the conference in my opinion brought into question the quality of
future DDC’s.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
Remove StopSpam to reply

“Tim Roberts” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:
>>
>> I was not invited to come to the DDC. I found it odd that a co-author
>> of one of the books on Device Drivers was turned down, and a co-author
>> of one of the extant Windows Drivers courses, would be turned down,
>> but apparently I was not good enough to be selected to attend.
>>
>
> Are you saying you never applied, or that you applied and never heard a
> response?
>
>> Based on the reports I heard, it would have been a waste of my time
>> and money to have attended, so it actually worked to my advantage.
>>
>
> I disagree; I will summarize shortly.
>
>> Unfortunately, I get the same impression of WinHEC, which is not aided
>> by their increasingly poor choice of venues. …The quality of the
>> material seems to be going downhill; there are too many (> 0) plenary
>> keynote addresses, and no chance for someone to get any breadth
>> because the “tracks” are all specialized and concurrent. The loss of
>> the “birds-of-a-feather” sessions and NDA evenings at WinHEC decreases
>> the value tremendously.
>>
>
> The people on this list are not necessarily the target audience for
> WinHEC. It’s aimed mostly at hardware managers, big OEMs, vice
> presidents, the press, and other technical decision makers, not at
> developers. That’s why we have the DDC.
>
>> As someone who is interested in drivers, I feel abandoned by an
>> attitude that can be characterized at best as indifference and at
>> worst as openly hostile to developers.
>>
>
> That’s nonsense. I was going to keep quiet about this thread, but I
> have to speak up. Now, I understand that both Don and you are
> inherently negative people, and that negativity colors your responses to
> a very great degree, but I want to make sure that the other people who
> read this also understand where you’re coming from.
>
> I simply do not understand what the senior people on this list were
> expecting from the DDC. When you’ve been in this business for as many
> years as we have, it is extremely difficult to imagine what kind of
> content could have been presented that is really “new”. We know the
> tools. We’ve all heard the “best practices” speeches hundreds of
> times. We know the party line. We know where we’ve been, and we pretty
> much know where we’re going. I get the impression that some people
> would not have been satisfied with the DDC unless the Microsoft
> management team had taken each attendee out to a private lunch and said,
> “guess what, we now have an automated tool that will create drivers in
> 10 minutes that are guaranteed to be bug-free!”
>
> There were many sessions at the DDC where the hardware development teams
> presented real information about how their tools were created, what
> pitfalls they encountered, what steps they used to ensure quality, and
> what reasoning led to certain trade-offs. That’s top-notch information
> from people who know what they are doing. Did they agree to satisfy
> every attendee, or release full source code, or include every weird
> feature request? No, of course not. Does that make the conference less
> valuable? No, of course not.
>
> When you’ve been writing storage drivers for 15 years, it is entirely
> unrealistic to expect that you can attend a storage session at a DDC and
> receive 90 minutes jam-packed with brand-new and exciting information.
> Of COURSE most of it is going to be review. How could it not be?
> There’s just not that much new information. The best you can expect is
> to learn a few good tidbits here and there, to present your key issues
> to people who care, to make a few good contacts, and to commiserate with
> others who are in the same boat. THAT’S what the DDC provided, and it
> did so excellently.
>
> Some people are never satisfied. When you went to your first amusement
> park, it was probably a magical experience for you, filled with wonder.
> But after you’ve been to 6 or 7 amusement parks, the magic is gone.
> Does that make the visit useless?
>
>> So I wonder why I am supposed to care.
>>
>
> I’m not sure who asked you to care.
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>

20

‘False advertising at its worst.’

Don, maybe it’s time to give it a rest; whatever horse your beating, that mug is long since dead,
and this is just over the top, even for you, on a bad day, which I’m guessing today qualifies as.

Personally, I’m not so sure that whether something at the DDC was billed as 200 or 400 is all that
important.

No mas,

mm

Don Burn wrote:

Tim,

I should have also mentioned that every presenter I queried at this
DDC stated they had a 200 level presentation that management decided to
inflate the number to 400. Sorry this is false advertising at its worst, I
do not blame the developers who presented, I blame the organizers who pushed
through this stuff when there was not enough significant material to justify
the conference. I know of at least one person who had set his yearly goal
for this year to have a DDC, which is stupid since the material was not
there, and the conference in my opinion brought into question the quality of
future DDC’s.