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Is it possible to develop a Windows driver (specifically a PDF-like printer driver that displays the data on-screen instead of actually printing) without using Visual Studio? I'm thinking of using free C++ tools such as MinGW/gcc.

manlio
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Rob
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    Everything you need, compiler, linker and debugger, is included with the DDK. Free. – Hans Passant Jun 09 '10 at 11:51
  • @Hans Passant: minus the IDE! –  Jan 30 '11 at 06:44
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    @snmc - An IDE is pretty useless for driver development, doesn't help you build nor debug. It's an editor, that's all. You can get that for free as well, the Express edition is a decent editor. – Hans Passant Jan 30 '11 at 07:04

2 Answers2

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Both the Windows SDK and the Windows DDK come with the Visual C++ compiler. You don't need Visual Studio for this, though you may have some success with the free Express editions. I'd prefer this over MinGW anytime.

OregonGhost
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    Op was asking for _free_ c++ tools. While it depends on Rob's definition of free, mingw has a far more open license, and it can be of relevance for professional driver development; see here: http://groveronline.com/2008/07/mingw-cross-compilation-adventure/. Also, if one prefers to actually understand the linking and how the compiler is handling things, mingw/g++ with Make is going to be much better. – SullX Sep 28 '14 at 03:28
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Your bigger problem is going to be displaying the data on-screen from a driver. Drivers run in the context of the spooler, which is a service and therefore can't display a UI. You're going to need a non-driver app running in the user's session to display the data. You could use pipes or even files to pass the data from the driver to the display app.

Carey Gregory
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