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OSR's
Development Toolkits
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File Systems Development Kit (FSDK)
Even with the materials available now, file systems development for Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 remains
a very challenging task. It can be surprisingly challenging. If you haven't tried it yourself,
take our word for it: we've developed several real, commercially-shipping, Windows file systems.
Sure, there are code examples - for some of the interfaces - available now. And the Microsoft IFS kit
even has a small amount of documentation. And that's very helpful.
You might also be able to use one of the books on Windows that are
available. Of course, they are already out of date and some of the details are wrong.
They aren't "cutting edge." They don't cover NT 4.0, let alone Windows Server 2003. Finally,
Microsoft has told everyone that the file systems interfaces aren't truly stable so they may
change from release to release.
Of course, in addition to the technical hurdles, your company probably has marketing
and business requirements - get a product to market quicker, with more features, and do
it on a smaller budget. Or perhaps you also have a staffing issue; finding file systems
experts is challenging enough, but Windows file systems experts are difficult to find
and expensive to boot.
The OSR FSDK can help you overcome these obstacles and achieve your goals: hitting that marketing
window, keeping your engineering costs under control, and maximizing the functionality your file
system provides. How? By providing you with a simple, clean interface in which you can implement
your file system functionality without first having to become an expert in Windows file systems.
The way our FSDK reduces your work and the complexity of your
task is simple - indeed, it is the core idea behind the Windows
Miniport and WDM Mini-Driver models. Someone implements the
"common" part of the functionality as a library, and then everyone
else builds the portion that makes their product unique by
using that library.
We recognize a good idea when we see it. So for Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 File Systems, this is
exactly what OSR has done. We've put years of effort into building a package that
handles the common Windows-specific issues. This frees your scarce development team
resources so they can then build the part of your product that adds value rather than
simply reinventing the "common code." As with WDM Mini-Drivers, you could build an entire
driver yourself - but it would take longer to implement, debug, and test (not to mention
maintain).
For the FSDK Diagram click here.
Also, since we set out to make the FSDK a true kit, we loaded it with numerous
features that you won't find in a typical file system example, such as code to ensure that your
implementation is correct. The OSR FSDK tells your development team when they've done
something wrong and provides them with information on how to fix it. This is something
you can't get from source code examples, documentation, seminars, or books. And if
that isn't enough, the entire OSR technical staff is standing behind the FSDK to answer
those tough questions - included as part of the FSDK package.
Using the FSDK means that your engineering team members don't need to spend the
time to become experts on the esoteric aspects of the cache manager, virtual
memory subsystem, and file system interface. In fact, users of the FSDK don't need to
know much about Windows file systems development issues at all. The FSDK wrapper handles
all the hard stuff, and presents a straight-forward interface that's both documented
and supported. And, because the interface is much like the VFS
inteface found on UNIX platforms, porting your file system either
from or to a UNIX platform is almost easy.
Of course, if you already have a staff of expert Windows internals and file systems
folks you might not need the FSDK. Or perhaps you have the years it will take to build
that team. But, to be truthful, even clients who have access to the entire Windows
source code base have found the FSDK to be useful, strictly as a way to force
structure on their code, save development time, and decrease their time to market. Really!
OSR's FSDK is backed with a full year of
support and updates - including automatic maintenance and
upgrades. When a new release of Windows (for example, Windows Server 2003) ships, clients using OSR's FSDK
simply upgrade to the next FSDK release.
So, free your developers from spending their time reading file
system example code, and trying to figure out just how the examples
work and why. With the FSDK, your development team can be
writing useful code for your file system now.
Imagine what they could do w ithout having to concern themselves with whether or not (or
how, or why, or when) they might need to call functions like
CcUnpinRepinnedBcb( ). (No, we didn't make
that one up.)
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