Poll: Which IDEs are being used by driver developers?

I would like to use this post as a way to find out, what different IDEs are being used for driver development. It would be nice, if you could write your favorite IDE(s) and a small explanation (and possibly a link) about their strengths and weaknesses. It doesn't matter, which company created the IDE, since this could be a nice opportunity for many people to learn what options are available.

Personally, I've tried Visual Studio (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx), however I consider it too heavy. One advantage, though, is that it can be combined with DDKBUILD (http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?article=43), in order to provide seamless interaction with the WDK compiler. You can look at http://hollistech.com/Resources/ddkbuild/ddkbuild.htm for additional information. Hopefully, in the future, Visual Studio might also support WDK help integration. Currently, I'm using Source Insight (http://www.sourceinsight.com/), which is much lighter. I like the fact that it has symbol windows for each file, syntax formatting and many other useful options, such as smart rename of variables (e.g. if I choose to rename a variable called buffer to Buffer that is used inside a function Foo, it won't rename a variable called Stringbuffer and it won't rename any other variable called buffer that is outside of Foo).

So, which IDE(s) are you using?

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2007
  SlickEdit - http://www.slickedit.com Besides many other great features it allows to integrate host system driver/app development and e.g. firmware cross-development of the target in one workspace. It's simply the best (I know). HS2

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2007
  Visual Studio + Visual Assist (http://www.wholetomato.com/)
  

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2007
  VS2005.. I do a lot of usermode development too.  Right now mostly filesystem work, but I've been using VS for so many years its a pain to change.  Of course I use windbg for all my debugging, even usermode.  I am going to try out Source Insight.  Looks rather "busy" from the screenshots though.

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2007
  I use pspad (http://www.pspad.com/) with cmd.exe window open to run the makefile. Simple and fast.

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2007
  I use emacs with etags, cscope

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2007
  Visual SlickEdit.  Originally a CodeWright user, but Borland tanked that.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2007
  I use Visual Studio with Mark Roddy's DDKbuild script (http://www.hollistech.com/) to integrate with the DDK environment. I also still do a lot of work with just the build CMD windows, since things like PC-Lint and SDV are not integrated with DDKbuild.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2007
  I use SlickEdit as well.  It's got to be one of the best editors out there, and it's easily configured to launch ddkbuild.  It's tags support is one of the best available.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2007
  In past projects, VS + Visual Assist. In current projects - Source Insight

• Anonymous
  February 21, 2007
  I use vim with exuberant ctags.

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2007
  VS2005 + VisualAssist All my development goes on in that environment...

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2007
  Currently, for Windows development I use C++Builder 6, although sometimes I work with Visual C++ (6.0 & 2005).

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2007
  VS2005 + OSR DDKBUILD + Visual Assist X Installing the December 2006 MSDN Library from DVD almost fully integrates WDK help ... select-text-and-hit-F1 on a WDK type/DDI name brings up the "Information Not Found" page (doh!) but the Index list has the correct entry selected (woohoo!)

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2007
  gvim + cmd.exe I usually have several Gvim editor windows open along with 1-3 command windows open to build / grep / etc. (So maybe I'm using the OS as the IDE?) I use Gvim because:

• I learned it well when I was coding in Windows / Linux / Solaris all at the same time and wanted one universal editor
• It's very lightweight
• It's very configurable
• Once you learn the intuitive (lol) keyboard commands, they actually are pretty quick to use. (sometimes I also use Understand for code analysis, graphical call charts, etc. ) Gvim @ http://www.vim.org Understand @ http://www.scitools.com/products/understand/cpp/product.php

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2007
  I've been a Source Insight user for the last 6 years or so. I've tried SlickEdit, but it just never grabbed me. Light-weight + stable + speedy + darn pretty = happy developer

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2007
  I edit my code in Visual Studio 2005, but I build the drivers in another console window. It all works great :)

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2007
  I use VIM + ctags. I usually set the makeprg variable to build.bat, so that I can build the driver without leaving vim. Additional advantage is that I can jump directly to errors. set makeprg=for %c in ("pushd ." "setenv %DDK_PATH% w2k c" "popd" "build") do call %~c

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2007
  Visual Studio + Visual Assist here too. VS "works"....I have some issues, but I haven't really seen much better. Visual Assist makes up for many of the missing features.

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2007
  I use Notepad++ and a console window. At first I thought it will be very difficult, as I got used to Visual Studio; but things are perfect.

• Anonymous
  June 11, 2007
  I'm a newbie windows driver developer but I'm using Vim (http://www.vim.org) because I'm very used to it and Vim is very easy to configure and with a little work we can make it act as an IDE.

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2007
  I use Vim + ctags (http://ctags.sourceforge.net) + the tag list plugin (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=273).

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2007
  My driver experiments a few years ago mostly used Visual Studio 2005 betas + DDKbuild (Mark Roddy's version + tweaks) + Notepad + gvim.  A few experiments used Visual Studio 6 + Walter Oney's stuff. In comparison, my user mode programming uses Visual Studio 2005 (or sometimes 6 or sometimes eVC) + Notepad + gvim + Wordpad + Word.  A maximized Wordpad window can display more text than the code editor in Visual Studio, so it was convenient in editing some resource files. I've read that theoretically it shouldn't be necessary to use tools like Word to view all the characters that might be present in some unknown code page in the source code for a driver, but the DDK contained a few files that disagreed.  I haven't checked whether things have improved since then.  7-bit-clean source files are still useful in some situations. My earlier driver work had used vim, gcc, modprobe, and ... oops, no IDE.

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2008
  +1 for gvim/cmd What? cmd.exe isn't an IDE? Sure it is! You've got a file list, findstr, build, source control, etc. :) I've found that cmd.exe is MUCH better to use when you have a program to create aliases. (I think there may have been an alias.exe as part of a resource kit; I wrote my own--it's very easy; it's just a big wrapper around the win32 function AddConsoleAlias (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms681935.aspx).

• Anonymous
  August 24, 2008
  2wI'll thingk about it.7e I compleatly disagree with last post .  yut <a href="http://skuper.ru">паркет и ламинат</a> 2o