status and error reporting to the notification area

NTDEV
1

I’ve noticed some drivers report status to the notification area of the task bar on Win 7.
Is this directly available to the drivers or is it done with the help of a user .dll?

I realize this feature can quickly saturate the desktop and developers may start sending debugging printfs to this interface.

thanks,
massoud

2

Perhaps they use IoRaiseInformationalHardError():
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa490594.aspx
Contrary to the documentation, this function doesn’t seem to be limited to
I/O statuses only.

On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:17:00 +0100, wrote:
> I’ve noticed some drivers report status to the notification area of the
> task bar on Win 7.
> Is this directly available to the drivers or is it done with the help of
> a user .dll?
>
> I realize this feature can quickly saturate the desktop and developers
> may start sending debugging printfs to this interface.
>
> thanks,
> massoud

3

As far as I know, there’s no direct (clean ?) way to do that.
You have to implement an IOCTL in your driver that returns the status, and then to write a user-mode application that lives in the system tray and uses the IOCTL to get the info and display it.
In any case, even if it was possible, you should NOT try to make a driver interact with the user space directly.

4

> Is this directly available to the drivers or is it done with the help of a user .dll?

With the help of user .dll

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com