>I am also curious to know is there a way of creating the .inf using any
tools. Going through the MSDN documents and doing it manually, looks
impossible.
My belief is Microsoft OS’s are becoming so complex (have become) that
people can only be specialists in very small areas. This seems exactly like
what happened with mainframes long ago. Writing a driver will soon require
(has already) a specialists in the correct flavor of driver (video, ndis,
WDM multimedia, …), an install specialists, a WHQL certification
specialists, and few other specialists. The amount of knowledge needed to
correctly handle each of these areas simple adds up to more than a single
developer is capable of.
I’d also suggest the architecture and “style” of the interfaces make a huge
difference in how much total knowledge is needed to accomplish an end
result, like a new driver. Microsoft seems to have taken the strategy of
MANY small teams doing their own thing, which has the effect of creating a
unique knowledge domain for each area, and we as developers have to cope
with understanding many of these domains all at once. It would take more
work on Microsoft’s part to make everything nice and consistent, in
exchange things would be a lot easier for us developers. It’s hard to say
how end users would react to major changes in the pricing of OS parts vs.
third-party parts.
All I know is current computers are REALLY broken, and shipping “new
architecture” half-baked ideas are just going to shift us to a different
place of really broken computers.
Personally, I have a lot more interest in being an “expert” in some
“system” I can understand, instead of a specialized worker ant in some
giant rats nest of code that nobody really fully understands. I think the
trend toward “computer appliances” is partially a reaction to this
overwhelming complexity in “general purpose” OS’s.
- Jan