At this point, I hope we’ve made clear the fact that when it comes to File System Minifilters, doing good engineering and playing by the rules is not enough to ensure interoperability. There are too many variables at play, those variables are constantly changing, “the rules” aren’t clear and they’re not well-understood by all the players. Plus, there exist all manner of File System Minifilters and applications that behave pretty much however they want.
The result is that interoperability problems will show up. They are an inherent part of developing products in this space. We just must live with this reality. That’s the hard truth.
So, is all lost? What do we do?
After 30 years of working in this space, here at OSR we’ve come up with some strategies. And we use these strategies to guide our FESF design, development, and support activities.