It's nothing earth-shattering, but it feels like the folks who put the kit together no longer "get it" when it comes to what matters in the build environment for us devs.

Here are a few examples of kind of things I'm talking about:

• When you build your driver (using the traditional "build -cZ" command or just "bcz"), warnings are no longer displayed in your terminal window.  You can still get to them, of course, but you'll have to find the file named buildchk_wlh_amd64.wrn.


• Warnings are no longer treated as errors in the checked build environment (as they have been for years), but they are treated as errors in the free build environment.


• The functions PoCallDriver and PoStartNextPowerIrp have been declared deprecated in the Vista checked build environment, causing all sorts of mess.

In terms of PoCallDriver and PoStartNextPowerIrp, let me start by saying that the Windows power management team has done the driver development world a great service by making these calls unnecessary in Vista (as reported previously in The NT Insider).  In Vista, PoCallDriver just calls IoCallDriver, and PoStartNextPowerIrp does nothing.  So, the changes to Vista rendering these DDIs unnecessary are great, and we owe them a case of beer (or something) as thanks.

What's not so great is the fact that these functions were declared "deprecated."

If you include either PoCallDriver or PoStartNextPowerIrp in your code, you get a warning... in the Vista checked build environment only.  You don't get the warning in the Vista free build environment, or in any of the down-level build environments (free or checked).  The warning:

d:\blahblah\nothingpower.c(442) :
warning C4996: 'PoCallDriver' was declared deprecated

Don't forget that you actually have to find the .wrn file to see this warning, because warnings are no longer displayed by the compiler by default.

That's not so bad, right?  Confusing and untidy, but once you figure out what's going on nothing too much to rant about?  Well, consider that you'll have to just live with the warnings if you want a single version of your driver to build in the Vista build environment but run on Vista and also down-level platforms.

Of course, if you're willing to build multiple versions of your driver (one for Vista, and another for down-level platforms) it gets really ugly.  You wind up with code that looks like the following: