Basically I agree with what Peter has to say. However in some cases there
are advantages for using 3rd party development tools:
(1) Support - a developer will never get an answer to a question like “My
code is broken, what should I do…” not from MS DDK support nor from
mailing lists. Unfortunately, I will have to answer this poor guy if he
uses our tools 
(2) Samples - Ready made samples, and libraries for specific chip-set
vendors (such as PLX, Cypress, Altera…) can really help. It has nothing
to do with DDK - when write a device driver you still have to learn how to
access those specific hardware.
(3) Other special cases:
- For example, one of my previous work places, was a small hardware
company. I had to develop hardware access programs for the hardware
engineers, for hardware debugging purposes. Instead of hiring a special
software engineer to do the job, they could have used a tool like WinDriver
to do the hardware access and debugging. - There are cases you can have all your hardware access code in the use
mode. Writing driver in user mode isolates the programmer from any DDK/kernel.
Regards Ilya,
R&D
Jungo Ltd.
Email: xxxxx@jungo.com
Web: http://www.jungo.com
Phone: 1-877-514-0537(USA) +972-9-885-8611 (Worldwide) Ext. 117
Fax: 1-877-514-0538(USA) +972-9-885-0619 (Worldwide)
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