What does everyone think of Numega (Compuware) DriverWorks?

NTDEV
6

Ilya,

I don’t think it is buggy, in fact there is an outstanding developer by
the name of Bill McKenzie. And if you are trying to write some classes of
drivers, for ME/98 as well as NT/Win2k/XP this is definitely the way to go.

That being said there are problems you need to be aware of with frameworks
(not just DriverWorks):

  1. Sooner or later you will have a bug that will require diving under
    the framework, this has the problem that you now have to be an expert on the
    DDK and on DriverWorks.

  2. There are more consultants and developers who know the DDK, than
    there are developers who are comfortable with DriverWorks. Many consultants
    do not want to use a framework, since they know the DDK and there is a
    learning curve cost that can be hard to justify with so few drivers written
    in frameworks.

  3. I have had customers who have had a problem where the framework
    company says the bug is Microsoft’s and Microsoft blames the framework. In
    the end the company with the driver loses.

  4. You may find you wish to extend your driver in a way that
    DriverWorks doesn’t support and the DDK does. This can be very painful and
    expensive, especially since many of these look like “simple additions to the
    driver”.

  5. Frameworks in general are not always up to the latest Beta’s of
    the OS or service packs. Normally this is not a problem, but like point 4
    above if you have a need for a feature in the beta, you may have to wait or
    pull a nasty workaround.

  6. Framework firms have gone out of business or dropped support of a
    framework. I don’t expect this from Compuware but one must be aware of
    this. This is especially true in light of the fact Microsoft is working on
    a competing framework.

The choice is yours, as a consultant I do not take jobs involving
frameworks since I have had too many bad experiences with case where
management thinks this should take a week or two, and the easiest solution I
see is throw out the driver and rewrite it with the DDK. By the same
token, if you device fits a class that the framework supports this is a
quick and cheap way to get a reasonable working driver.

Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting

----- Original Message -----
From: “Ilya Dreytser”
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 10:29 AM
Subject: [ntdev] What does everyone think of Numega (Compuware) DriverWorks?

> Hi.
>
> My company is using the DriverWorks package to create several PCI drivers.
>
> Drivers created, drivers work, everything is great!
>
> Then our client gets us to hire a driver expert consultant, who proceeds
> to tell them that DriverWorks is very very bugy, poorly supported, and not
> fit to write a driver for a toaster!
>
> So, I wanted to get the comments of other people in the driver development
> field, the real life if you will (since this guy basically teaches
> Mircosoft driver writing for a living), and see what people say about
> DriverWorks, and their experiences with the package.
>
> Thanks!
>
> —
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http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
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