Summary

This is the first blog in a series diving into Windows driver internals. This post will show how to write a simple driver to facilitate our research purposes, and how you can build it without having to use Visual Studio.

I released a PowerShell script and sample project for building and signing basic drivers for further research purposes. You can download the project here.

Pre-requisites

I did this with:

  • Windows 11 24H2 (OS Build 26100.4652)
  • Visual Studio 2022 (17.14.9)
  • Windows SDK (26100.4654)
  • Windows Driver Kit (WDK; 10.0.26100.2452)

Normal Driver Build Flow

To figure out how to build a driver without Visual Studio, I first needed to figure out all of the steps Visual Studio was doing. I created a Kernel Mode Driver (KMDF) sample project in Visual Studio, then recorded all new processes with Procmon when building the solution. The process tree looks something like this: