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Sources/Dirs Converter? Gone from the Win 10 V1511 WDK

It’s becoming clear that VS 2015 (Update 1) and the Win 10 WDK V1511 is the “gift that keeps on giving”… but not necessarily is a good way.

Last week, we discovered that SDV was broken — in fact, completely disabled — by VS 2015 Update 1.

Today, I was going to do some work on a set of drivers we got from a client. These drivers build using the Windows 7 WDK. “No problem,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just suck them into VS 2015 using the Import Sources/Dirs option.”

Ah… no. The “Import Sources/Dirs” option is gone. In fact, the whole Name2MsBuild utility is gone. It’s vanished from the WDK!

Not being willing to believe it, I consulted my friend Google who showed me this page:

NoImport

I could barely believe me eyes.

So, as grabbed for the Valium I began to fire-off a flaming email to my friends in Redmond, and started this blog post.  But just before I got to writing the truly toasty part of the email… the part where I started to talk about people’s mothers… I stopped.  I thought: “Hmmmm… I wonder if I just create a blank WDM driver project, and suck the files in… I wonder if that’ll work and how long that’ll take?”

And, in fact, it did work.  And it took about 10 seconds.  Hmmm.  I deleted my in-progress email.  I changed the title of this blog post.

Now, granted: The project I converted was super simple.  It didn’t include any other directories or do anything too very clever.  But the point is, when you think about it, the Name2MsBuild converter kinda sucked anyways.  And, before you moved a real project, permanently, you’d really want to rebuild the project from scratch in any case.

So, perhaps bidding farewell to Nmake2MsBuild isn’t a tragedy on the scale of SDV not working.

But it still was a surprise.  And those kind of “you don’t get this tool anymore” surprises are never good.  And this surprise could have been avoided with some preliminary warnings and some (even false expressions of) concern for what the community thought.

Even if the converter did kinda suck.  Or mostly suck.  Cuz, admit it, it did.  And I’m really not going to miss it.  But I’m still annoyed.