5 replies to this topic

[bardackx]

How do you program a virtual driver or virtual peripheral for Windows7

What do you do, to make the computer thinks that it actually have a physical device plugged in all on software?

[Ancient Dragon]

First learn how to write a Device Driver. You need to use the Windows DDK.

[bardackx]

Ok, thats a relief, I already have the WDK, Do you know about a tutorial or expamples developing Virtual Devices?

[Ancient Dragon]

No, sorry. Never did anything like that. Hereis one book from Amazon, but I see it doesn't have very good review from two people who have read it. You might also way to read through some of these google links.

[dbug]

If I remember well, in previous versions of the Windows DDK, there were a sample driver with source code for a toaster (a virtual device). It is a full plug & play virtual driver, implementing its own bus driver and some other things. I supose that Windows 7 DDK also includes this example. I think it's a good place to start for virtual devices, but it's not trivial. There are a lot of low level concepts that you must understand or chances are that your drivers will crash Windows.

In previous versions of Windows it was possible to write non plug & play drivers. It was not recomended but allowed (I'm not sure if this is true for Windows 7). They are a lot more simple to implement, but lack many desirable functionalities. It's possible to create some virtual devices with this method, but I'm not so sure that you could create virtual disks or similiar this way.

[bardackx]

Thankyou very much, I didn´t know about the toaster example, I made a search in google and found the link below, now I do have a place to start.

Here´s the link:

How to create a virtual device/hardware - Sysinternals Forums