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USB Technologies

Universal Serial Bus (USB) provides an expandable, hot-pluggable Plug and Play serial interface that ensures a standard, low-cost connection for peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, scanners, storage devices, modems, and video conferencing cameras. Migration to USB is recommended for all peripheral devices that use legacy ports such as PS/2, serial, and parallel ports. Drivers for most USB devices should use WDF.

For information about USB standards organization, see USB Implementers Forum.

Windows Driver Stack for USB Devices

Check out these frequently asked questions from developers who are new to developing USB devices and drivers that work with Windows operating systems.

New in Windows 8

USB-related Sessions at the BUILD Conference

Programming USB Devices

Microsoft OS descriptors can be used by IHVs to store in firmware much of the information that is now typically provided to customers separately. Window retrieves that information by reading Microsoft OS descriptors, and uses it to install and configure the device without requiring any user interaction.

Microsoft OS Descriptors

USB Hardware Certification and Testing

Guidelines for hardware vendors and device manufacturers to prepare their USB devices and host controllers for Windows Hardware Certification submission.

Hardware Certification Kit USB-IF Testing

USB Power Management

USB-related Blog Posts

Microsoft Windows USB Core Team Blog

Building Windows 8 Blog

Building robust USB 3.0 support

A Hole In My Head

Of Pipes and Endpoints

Pointless Blathering

How to enable USB selective suspend and system wake in the UMDF driver for a USB device

Getting Started with USB Client Driver Development

Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) provides specialized input/output (I/O) targets in both User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) and Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) are hardware-specific and support USB devices. You can use the USB I/O targets to write a fully functional Windows driver for a USB device that uses the Windows USB device stack.

Writing USB Drivers with WDF

Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta includes USB User-Mode Driver and USB Kernel-Mode Driver templates that generate starter code for a UMDF and KMDF USB client driver, respectively.

Tasks for a USB Client Driver

Accessing USB Devices from Applications

Applications can send requests to a USB device if its function driver is Winusb.sys. Such applications can use a set of functions included in the WDK to communicate with the device.