Michael Tsang - What kinds of skills does someone need to write drivers?

Posted: May 27, 2004 at 10:41 AM

By: The Channel 9 Team

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Michael Tsang writes the drivers that run the Tablet PC, so we were wondering what kinds of skills someone would need to write drivers.

Any other driver writers hang out here? How do you see your jobs being different from others? What kinds of things are you worrying about?

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kevshaw Protein Chemistry

May 28, 2004 at 6:44 AM

How true - you can't assume anything. Valuable lesson.
stewo MVP - Windows DDK

Jul 23, 2004 at 3:16 PM

IMHO, writing drivers assumes much more liability than writing applications. Although it's always bad if software crashes, what a difference between a crashing app. vs. a crashing driver: The latter tears down the whole system!

As Michael says, drivers need to protect against race conditions due to resources getting accessed from various asynchronous contexts, including interrupt handlers.

Spin locks, "atomic" access to data and other interlocked operations are sometimes not easy to implement.
Cyberbob

Mar 15, 2006 at 3:37 AM

HI Tsang,

Your information provided on the site was very intresting and very good, i am using a TC4200 on which we aer experiencing issue unable towrite on the edge of the screen about 1 cm on all the four sides of the screen, but when i use the pen to get the start menu options it works fine.

Could you all explain me why we need to install the Wacom driver on the tablet pc.

Regards
Cyberbob