What's the difference between a free build and a checked build?

Question

I just installed the Windows Driver Kit for XP - Windows 7 and this may come as a silly question, but what is the difference between a "free build" and a "checked build"?

PS: I'm not a driver developer, I installed it merely to check some header files for P/Invoke.

@Rup: ah, just different terminology than normal builds then. — Abel, Apr 02 '12 at 18:02

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 02 '12 at 19:40

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Driver developers will often run their code on "checked" Windows builds - Windows editions that have been compiled without optimizations and are, as such, easier to debug crashes on and will product better memory dumps and have more accurately matching symbols.

The "free" builds are the normal releases.

answered Apr 02 '12 at 19:40

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

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That makes sense. I had completely forgotten about the checked builds of Windows versions. Tx. – Abel Apr 02 '12 at 19:45
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Please note that the checked/free build environments in the WDK have little to do with the checked/free build of Windows. The build environment you choose dictates the version of your code that you want to build (checked or free), irrespective of the version of Windows your code is going to run on (checked or free). – snoone Apr 03 '12 at 13:37

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 02 '12 at 22:01

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I would like to add that "checked" build also usually have a lot of assert() calls, thus checking parameters, etc. much more vigorously.

answered Dec 02 '12 at 22:01

cxxl

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What's the difference between a free build and a checked build?

2 Answers2