WDK NuGet: A new way to develop drivers on Windows

[Guest Paul_Eze]

We are excited to introduce the WDK NuGet, a new offering that enables developers to build drivers for Windows.

 

The WDK is the essential tool for developing, testing and deploying drivers on the Windows platform. It provides the headers, libraries, tools and metadata that you need to create drivers for Windows devices.

 

Previously, the WDK was available as an MSI installer or an ISO file.

 

The WDK NuGet contains the compiled code, libraries, headers, tools and metadata for driver development. You can easily consume the WDK NuGet package by adding it to your project and then calling its functionality in your project code.

 

The WDK NuGet offer some advantages over the traditional WDK offerings:

 

• It is smaller in size, which reduces the download and setup time.
  
• It is portable across different machines and environments.
  
• It can be integrated with large CI/CD pipelines and source control systems.
  
• It better support an agile WDK release model, it can be easily updated latest WDK features and fixes.
  

 

The WDK NuGet is now publicly available on nuget.org, where you can find the latest and previous versions of the package.

 

To get started with the WDK NuGet, you need to have Visual Studio 2022 or later installed on your machine. You can then follow the steps in this Microsoft Learn documentation to install the WDK NuGet package and create your first driver project.

 

We are also working on improving the developer experience while developing their driver projects from Visual Studio by adding WDK as a Visual Studio individual workload. This will make it easier to install and update the WDK NuGet package from the Visual Studio installer.

 

We hope you enjoy the WDK NuGet package and find it useful for your driver development needs. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to make it better.

 

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