VisualDDK is an extension to Visual Studio 2005/2008, that allows developing and debugging drivers directly from Visual Studio IDE. It includes Driver Wizard, debugger plugin for Visual Studio and Driver Launcher. Additionally it allows executing all WinDbg commands via a console window integrated into Visual Studio. If you are using VMWare or VirtualBox, you can speed up kernel debugging more than 60x by using VirtualKD extension instead of slow virtual COM port.

VisualDDK offers a complete, free and open-source replacement for console DDK builds and WinDbg. Instead, you can create your driver project using a convenient Driver Wizard, or import existing source files into projects managed by Visual Studio. Driver Wizard supports both x86 and x64 platforms, as well as allows selecting an exact OS type in DDK/WDK.

After you created a project, you can simply deploy it to your remote machine using VisualDDK Launcher. You select, where exactly should the .SYS file be copied, how it can be started and stopped (you can specify a command line, a PnP hardware ID to start/stop, or a device name and an IOCTL to send). Afterwards, debugging a driver is as easy as debugging a simple Win32 application.

VisualDDK provides a powerful Expression Visualizer that allows you to see a mapped NTSTATUS code every time you examine a NTSTATUS variable, shows extended information about File, Device, Driver Objects & etc., translates values for Flags and Type fields for different system structures, making it meaningful, and finally shows you object name and the real object itself for every handle you examine.

Features :

Allows developing, building and debugging drivers directly from Visual Studio.
Contains a Driver Wizard allowing to create new driver projects or import existing code.
Provides a Launcher allowing to copy and start your drivers on a remote machine directly from VS.
Loads kernel symbols much faster than WinDbg.
Resolves symbols by names (or indicates an error) much faster than WinDbg by using hash tables and DIA interface.
Visualizes NT types in a convenient way (see Expression Visualizer and VisualDDKHelpers pages).
Based on WinDbg debugging engine, thus, supports all connection types, protocols, settings and console commands, supported by WinDbg.

Platform: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista

System Requirements: There is no specific requirements