WinDrvr : Microsoft

Fixing WinHEC - Part 2

DonBurn — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:17:00 GMT

In my last posting, I presented how to fix WinHEC from the attendee's point of view. This post will look at why it is critical for Microsoft to get it right. For the last 10 years, the Windows group has been waging a war to improve driver quality. In that time, many great tools and initiatives have aided the development of better drivers. But there are still a lot missing items, and unfortunately, Redmond seems disconnected from some of the problems of the driver community. Yes, a number of us try to call this out, but even the most respected professional will not carry the impact of a room with over a hundred driver developers saying "This tool or program has a problem".

Right now, I cannot think of an effort from Redmond that does not need some improvement, but when I talk to Microsoft developers, many of them do not believe the problems are important. The problems can range from the breaking of most corporate (and many personal) driver build environments by the incompatible changes to the setenv script, to complexity of Driver Test Manager. Worse yet, some efforts that were initially praised by the community are now despised. Take WPP tracing, for example: almost everyone viewed this as a fantastic tool when it came out, but with incompatible revisions and inability of most of the community to get the more advanced features to work, developers are now ripping the traces out of their drivers.

Redmond seems to be charging ahead with new programs and tools, many which appear good, but actually miss the mark terribly. It was revealed on the Microsoft newsgroups recently that they are working on Visual Studio integration for device driver development. While the community talks about this a lot, at last year's WinHEC, when the question was asked (in the one feedback forum that was held), most people rated this extremely low when compared to other tools and fixes to the existing tools.

Microsoft, you need to get the input of the community. Surveys such as the recent DTM survey are worthless, since they structure the answers into preconceived categories and do not allow the community to interact with each other and Microsoft. The great strength of Windows is the large number, and for most part, good quality of drivers available. Please don't waste your time on efforts without getting the community involved early on.

So, let's see a WinHEC that is exciting enough to attract a large audience, and filled with feedback sessions attended by Microsoft developers and managers to hear about the problems the community needs fixed.

Fixing WinHEC

DonBurn — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:11:00 GMT

As anyone who has been to WinHEC over the years knows, its content swings between being a heavy technical conference and being a marketing conference. This year’s WinHEC is scheduled for November 4-7, 2008, again in Los Angeles, California. I do not expect much from this venue, since neither of the two WinHEC’s previously in LA had a strong technical presence. Going to LA requires putting engineers on airplanes and into hotel rooms and not just for a few hours in a Seattle conference center.

So what makes a great techie WinHEC?

1. Lots of technical presentations – Some of the best conferences limited the keynotes to two. Good WinHEC’s offer repeats of talks and go until late the last day to allow people to get as much as possible.

2. Ask the Experts – Starting in 2001, Microsoft added Ask the Experts, where presenters were available after their talks to take questions. Sometimes this was in a separate room, sometimes this was over lunch. Personally, I like a separate room for an hour or so at each lunch break.

3. Birds of a Feather – For a number of years, there were Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions where, for example, driver developers could comment on any topic to the WDK team. Sometimes there was a direction provided by Microsoft; much of the feedback for WDF came in BOF’s, but mostly BOF’s were wide open.

4. Developer Lounge – Unfortunately, this only happened one year in Seattle. This was a quiet location near the trade show entrance where you could find many Microsoft developers hanging out. It was a great place to drop by and ask a question, and had the advantage of allowing people to make the conversation fairly private when needed (versus the wide open Ask the Experts).

Last year’s WinHEC did not do a good job: it had five keynotes, and shut down early giving techies only 12 hours of presentations, versus as many as 21 some years. There were no Ask the Experts, or BOF’s, or a developer lounge. Unfortunately, there is no sign this will change in 2008. Much of the problem is that it seems that Microsoft figures that WinHEC’s don’t need to be techie when they do not have a lot of new technology to present.

It is time for the techies to take back WinHEC. After all, it is supposed to be an engineering conference. It should be easy to add back the Ask the Experts, BOF’s and a developer lounge. On the technical side, there is nothing wrong with their presenting new things, but I believe most of the community would also be interested in some deep drill-downs on existing technologies. As a bonus, being able to give input for improvement on existing technologies could improve the quality of drivers for all of us.

For deep drill-downs, may I suggest we have multi-hour looks at subsystems like the memory manager and the I/O manager? How about having feedback discussions for some of the technologies that do not thrill developers, for instance DTM, WPP/ETW and the lack of support for things that cause some dev’s to hook?

Come on Microsoft, last year’s WinHEC was poorly attended and technically boring. The above suggestions on information to present touches on just a few items, and I am sure the developer community can add many more. There are plenty of topics that would excite developers and make the conference the event the place to be. But, without a change in direction, I think most of us in the driver community will stay away from “Los Angeles, the land of fruits, nuts and lousy conferences”

Improving the documentation

DonBurn — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:32:00 GMT

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft is now updating the WDK documentation monthly and is now providing a way to download these updated docs to your computer. This update, just for documentation, can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKdocs.mspx Microsoft should be congratulated for this effort to improve the documentation in a timely manner.

Currently there are some flaws to be aware of. First the install process does not take into account that many of us would just like to update the documentation we got with the WDK with the new docs. In fact, the installer does not even know about the WDK installation, and provides no way to update the documentation. I find that the installation of the WDK’s and its documentation are the least friendly parts of the product. After several attempts to install the updates, I finally pulled the doc files out of the underlying CAB file and put them in the help directory of the WDK where they belong.

The second problem is that the documentation does not have a feedback link so you can send in bug reports. This will be corrected in the next version, but for now the feedback alias is ddksurv1@microsoft.com. Having a well documented feedback alias is significant. Those who have been in the industry awhile may remember that when OSR hosted the documentation bug finding contest, the quality of the documentation went up significantly.

With all the new material in the documentation, there are errors. Now that there is a mechanism for providing feedback, and with frequent updates, we have a chance to fix these problems. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to it. I am going to cut this entry short so I can send some mail about the technical mistakes I know of in the doc set.

Document explorer versus useful data

DonBurn — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:21:00 GMT

There is a trend in the tools coming out of Microsoft that is driving me nuts and in my opinion significantly hurting productivity. This trend is the shrinking of the amount of data that appears on the display and requiring more mouse clicks to get there.

For driver writers this trend is most obvious in Document Explorer 8 which is used to display the Vista WDK documentation. Comparing it to HTML Help Control 5 that was used for Windows Server 2003 SP1 DDK the previous version will show you what I mean.

On opening the DDK documentation you have two major panes, the pane on the right goes from the toolbar to the bottom of the window, giving you a large amount of information, on my display (1280x1024) about 60 lines or a full page. When you open the WDK you see an extra pane on the right, called index results that takes away about 12 lines on my display or roughly 20% less useful data.

Now the second assault on data occurs when you search, with the DDK I get 36 terms on the screen, with the WDK I get 27 or a 25% drop in data. Worse yet, the search display is now a tabbed window in the data area making toggling between several elements of the search more cumbersome.

Of course index results mentioned previously also make thing more painful, since a large portion of the time you click on a kernel API in the index, instead of seeing the API in the data pane, you see some page about a use of the API, so you have to go down and click the index results to get the API. As an example go into the Vista DDK documentation, and choose ZwCreateFile in the index, I doubt most of us are looking for “TDI Kernel-Mode Client Interactions” when we look up ZwCreateFile but that is what we get.

Microsoft is doing all this at the same time that displays are going to wide screen models with 13% less vertical pixels. All of this adds up to taking longer to get the information needed to develop or check a driver, making it more likely that the implementation will be rushed and unreliable.

I don’t blame the WDK documentation group, the tool is a corporate standard. Perhaps the folks who designed and approved this trend have become so used to Power Point that more that six lines of data at a time is too much for them. Hopefully, Microsoft will wake up to the problem, at the recent WinHEC a feedback session was asked “How do you search for WDK help?” and the overwhelming answer was Google!

Bleeding edge and far from it

DonBurn — Sun, 20 May 2007 17:36:00 GMT

I am just back from WinHEC and while there I realized that many people including a number from Microsoft don’t distinguish developing for the leading edge from living there. I am known as a guy who has done a number of things that Redmond had said “Windows is not capable of doing” and technologies that Microsoft was later proud to show off once they were working.

When it comes to my tools, I am far from the bleeding edge. For instance, though I recently started using the latest Visual Studio, most of my work is still done with VS6. I like the new Studio, but I trust VS6 and that version produces code that for the most part needs no libraries other than the standard system lib’s to support it. I use Office XP and probably will not move for a long time, since I once had a terrible experience of not being able to send a customer a promised document, since the conversion back to the format the client was using did not work well.

I am not alone in this attitude; many of the developers I respect the most stay far away from the leading edge for their work environments. In this way we are like Seymour Cray, who required that the parts for his designs were in production and testable even though the systems he was designing were years off.

The challenge here is that Microsoft does not seem to understand this. The WDK team was proudly pointing out the features and fast updates with online MSDN, when most developers use the local documents. One of the new features with the MSDN stuff is a wiki capability that is supposed to be monitored by using an RSS feed. Most of the senior developers I know do not monitor this, since Microsoft’s previous generation of tools do not support RSS! Another RSS problem is that when Microsoft “improved” its blogging site, it dropped email notification of blog postings, because RSS was available in all the brand new tools.

Another example from WinHEC was the Windows Driver Testing Framework. This tool assumes you are using the latest Visual Studio to develop with managed languages using the full strength of COM. I know of almost no respected driver writers who know how to do this, and even fewer who would want to.

It has to be confusing for the WDK team because their core product is the exception that proves the rule. Over the years, the development community has found that BETA and just released versions of the DDK are excellent so we trust using these in our day to day work. Unfortunately, few other teams in Redmond inspire this confidence.

So, Microsoft, if you want us to keep developing on the bleeding edge, give us tools that do not force us to live there.

Tuning Channel 9

DonBurn — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:06:00 GMT

Last week I got an announcement that Rob Short is talking on Operating System Evolution (see http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=264874). Normally, I would be the first in line for one of his talks, but on Channel 9?… well, maybe some day I’ll watch it when I have time. For those of you who don’t know about Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/ , it is a site where Microsoft provides video interviews on technical subjects. The reason that I’m not enthusiastic about it is that I believe there are a couple of serious problems with Channel 9. These are:

1. There is no index

I answer a lot of questions for my customers and on Usenet, but much of the time I do not remember the exact answer, just where to find it. A typical Channel 9 presentation is close to an hour, and with no index this means that if I think something might be in a presentation, I have to waste a lot of time looking for it.

I do use the WinHEC videos, but they have an index, namely the PowerPoint slides that go with the talk. I have all the WinHEC slides from the last 10 years, and I still reference one of the old presentations every few months.

2. There is no way to take notes

Those PowerPoint slides from WinHEC have another great feature. They allow me to put notes in the speaker notes area. When I listen to the talk I take notes, and depending on the data, I will annotate the PowerPoint file. Also, I have found that it is a nice way to keep notes about using a technique presented in a talk.

So Redmond, how about fixing Channel 9? Right now I view Channel 9 as entertainment more than as a useful reference tool. How about some PowerPoint slides or even just some speaker notes to go with the presentation? But even there, Hollywood does better with their entertainment. Since even my Jurassic Park DVD has a chapter index, why doesn’t Channel 9 have an index? You bill Channel 9 as an important information tool. There is no reason it has to be such a dinosaur!