At 09:32 AM 7/9/96 +0100, Andy Brown wrote:
On 09 July 1996 02:04, John F. Fricker[SMTP:jfricker@vertexgroup.com] wrote:
One of these days Microsoft will officially release NT's IFS SDK. A few "preliminary" and incomplete copies of a 1993 beta release do float around but for a mere $50K there's a company that will sell you the complete source for an IFS. It's a crime that Microsoft hasn't shipped this SDK yet as the Installable File System is one of the great powers of NT.
You can do this with the existing device driver kit since they supply the entire source code to the AT hard disk driver. I took a look and decided that it would be too much work for me alone. They also seem to suggest that you can write "filters" that extend the capability of existing drivers.
So, if someone is interested in coughing up the $50K I know a couple NT programmers just chomping at the bit to build cool IFS's like PGPDrive, etc.
I'm one of them, but this low level device driver stuff makes me shudder!
- Andy
That's why the IFS SDK is so important. Writing device drivers is one thing and nasty at that but the IFS is higher level and exactly what is needed to create a PGPDrive that could exist on scsi, ide, tape, network drives, floppies, cd-roms, etc. A device driver implementation would be married to a particular controller type. --j