What is your experience with wdk, what are its capabilities?

Question

Iron

You need to work with the hardware, for example, get a list of all possible pci devices, control the webcam, determine the available memory access modes (dma pio), implement keyboard interception hooks (here, by the way, the program needs to make two modes hidden and normal in the hidden program is not on the panel tasks, in the tray and in the list of running applications of the manager), etc., because winapi has been used for a very long time, a lot has been forgotten and I don’t want to delve into it again. I decided to look at wdk, it seems like it should cope with such tasks. Platform one - windows. Does it make sense to learn wdk or do you have to remember winapi? I will clarify the reason for the choice: I would like to study the WDK, but there is no certainty that it will cope, but there is one in winapi.

Answer 1

Everything you listed is done on WinAPI and even higher level, working with a Webcam is better done not on VFW (WinAPI), which is well suited only for Win 9k and cameras from the 90s, but on DirectShow (DirectX) and other more modern libraries, hooks are WinAPI plus debugging understanding, etc. reverse engineering, the only thing WinDDK may need is to hide the running process, and for Win x64 you will have to buy a digital signature for your driver, so it's better to look for other ways, for example, disguising as "foreign" processes, injecting code into them.