The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is a software toolset from Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 that enables the development of device driver

Device driver

In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device....

s for the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 platform. It includes documentation, samples, build environments, and tools for driver developers.

History of WDK

Previously, the WDK was known as Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK) and supported Windows Driver Model

Windows Driver Model

In computing, the Windows Driver Model — also known at one point as the Win32 Driver Model — is a framework for device drivers that was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to replace VxD, which was used on older versions of Windows such as Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, as well...

 development. It got its current name when Microsoft released Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

 and added the following tools to the kit:

• Windows Driver Foundation
  Windows Driver Foundation
  Windows Driver Foundation is a set of Microsoft tools that aid in the creation of device drivers for Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows....
  
   (WDF)
• Installable File System
  Installable File System
  The Installable File System is a filesystem API in IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows that enables the operating system to recognize and load drivers for file systems...
  
   Kit (IFS Kit)
• Driver Test Manager
  Driver Test Manager
  The Windows Hardware Certification Kit is a test automation framework provided by Microsoft to certify devices for Windows....
  
   (DTM)

Later DTM was renamed to Windows Logo Kit (WLK) and separated from WDK.

External links

• Windows Driver Kit home page