Writing Windows Port Monitor Basics

Question

I\'m trying to find a basic example, tutorial, or blog post on how to write a printer port monitor. I downloaded the Windows DDK and dug through localmon, but it appears th

Answer 1

I have been over that exact same territory for a serial printer. About the best example I found was this article in Dr Dobbs Journal. The good part is that both a serial port driver and the user-space control program are covered and the project can also be used as an example of how to set up Visual Studio to compile a driver. This is also something a little difficult to find information about. The article discusses an old NT style driver, which worked well for me on XP.

There are quite a few good articles on CodeProject about writing drivers and programs to interact with them. They include source code and most deal with the newer WDM and WDF style drivers.

OSROnline is another good source, especially for discussion of specific issues and common mistakes. They also have some great utilities you will need.

Some of the most clearly written and understandable driver code I came across was Mark Russinovich's sample code. Although Microsoft withdrew all of the source when they purchased Sysinternals, some of the best examples can still be found cached here and there.

Drivers are pretty interesting. Whatever else you do though, do it in a virtual machine. Really.