Ilias Tsigkogiannis wrote:
As you said… they are APPLICATIONS! We are talking about DRIVERS!
There is a difference between these 2. Let’s say that somebody buys a
new device (keyboard/mouse/usb stick… it doesn’t matter), plugs it
in and gets a message saying “sorry, however Windows doesn’t support
your keyboard. Please go to www.microsoft.com/foo/bar, download our
KMDF installer and try again”.How happy do you think that this person would be? Especially now that
he has to use his computer with a non-working keyboard/mouse?
(a) I know exactly how you feel in this case - I experienced it.
For driver testing (also performance), I had to set up Win98SE on a
system with USB keyboard and mouse.
“Please click ‘continue’ to set up ”, otherwise installation
would not continue. The message came before the USB drivers were
active. (Yes, I resigned and got PS/2 devices at that point.)
(b) Because of this I would never remove the OPTION to include WDF with
a driver that needs it. And with core system components of course it
DOES make sense to include it!
But probably I don’t need another WDF installer for my mobile phone
firmware update driver, the web cam, the joypad driver, the bluetooth
adapter, the scanner, the video grabber, the smart card reader, the
printer and for all the other USB gizmos and gadgets that are on the
market.
For these I would advocate (1) a way of getting a message during WDF
driver install, if the necessary WDF version is not yet installed, and
(2) have a clean and lean install package that just installs the framework.
Then I would go and grab the one with the highest number on it (=latest
version, either from one of the product CDs or from the 'net), install
it, then do all of the WDF driver installations, and be done.
IIRC with less install time, fewer reboots (and fewer backup copies of
older versions of the WDF in the bowels of the system) than if every one
of these drivers brings its own framework version with it. Correct?
Never mind - if I see this correctly, it should not be difficult to make
something like a “pure” WDF framework install package.
Given the fact that a lot of install packages contain anyway slack stuff
(drivers for different OSes, “useful” applications, etc.) most probably
the additional megabytes for the framework installers does probably
really not matter much. I’ll just have to get used to it.