February 11, 2005 - As some of you know PCAUSA introduced preliminary
support for Windows XP for 64-Bit Extended Systems in May, 2004 with the
release of Rawether for Windows V5.5.17.00. The Rawether support provided at
that time was based on the Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program
release and the Windows Server 2003 DDK 64-Bit build environment.

After almost a year Windows XP 64-Bit Edition is finally nearing release.
Microsoft has recently released RC2 of Windows XP x64 Edition (Build 1433)
Technical Beta and a companion DDK 3790.1433.

I have taken some time to revisit the Rawether 64-Bit modifications and
found that they have held up pretty well. The Rawether 64-Bit drivers can be
built with the new 3790.1433 DDK build tools and run without any code
changes.

Building 64-Bit applications under the new 3790.1433 DDK build environment
didn't fare as well. The user-mode code didn't need changes - but the errors
returned the build tool were fairly hard to decipher. Since I don't really
like to build user-mode components with the DDK I decided to go another
route.

I turned my attention to using Visual Studio .NET 2005 for building 64-Bit
Rawether applications, and this went fairly smooth. I converted selected
Rawether Build 1802 Visual Studio .NET 2003 solutions and projects to Visual
Studio .NET 2005. I was able to build the stock Rawether 32-bit applications
and W32N55 DLL with no problem.

I then added the AMD64 configuration to selected applications and the W32N55
DLL (named "W64N55.DLL" for 64-bit deployment). I built these components for
both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit AMD64 using Visual Studio .NET 2005:

NDIScope.exe - Fairly complex MFC application.
W64N55.dll - API support DLL.
MPRead.exe - Multi-packet read application.

This went fairly smooth as well. There was one required code change in
NDIScope's OnTimer routines where an argument needed to be changed from UINT
to UINT_PTR. No other changes were required from the currently released
Rawether codebase.

Getting the Visual Studio .NET 2005 output folders and custom build settings
setup correctly was a little tedious.

The Rawether for Windows 64-bit drivers support both 32-bit and 64-bit
user-mode applications. Existing Rawether V5.5 32-bit applications will run
unmodified on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition until you have time to build your
own 64-bit target applications.

At this time PCAUSA is planning to release Rawether for Windows Build 1803
when Microsoft goes RTM on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition. Hopefully Microsoft
will also release Visual Studio .NET 2005 at about the same time. If so,
then PCAUSA will also release Visual Studio .NET 2005 solutions for building
all of the Rawether for Windows user-mode components for both 32-bit and
64-bit targets.

Regards,

Thomas F. Divine