Driver Development Kit

What Does Driver Development Kit Mean?

A driver development kit (DDK) is a software product offered by a software vendor or third-party development firm. It allows hardware vendors to develop software drivers for their hardware products. A DDK is intended to make the development process easy and typically includes detailed documentation and sample projects. It may include a build environment with testing tools for driver developers. This type of tool kit is often released by an operating system (OS) vendor to help developers build a software driver for a certain hardware product, or to update an existing software application driver to suit a newly released OS.

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Techopedia Explains Driver Development Kit

Typically, device manufacturers and software application developers use DDKs to make hardware compatible with one or more operating systems (OS). Some DDKs may be easily obtained from OS vendors. In those instances, the vendor has an interest in having a wide variety of hardware products that are compatible with the new OS.

However, third parties also develop DDKs to sell. A notable difference in these third-party DDKs is that they typically support operating systems from a certain vendor. Most DDKs include sample projects, an application programming interface (API) or component object model (COM) library and documentation. Some even contain a debugging utility, compiler, testing tools or other utilities.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…