After spending the better part of a weekend writing a specialized Windows driver for the purposes of allowing me to communicate with the Hyper-V hypervisor, as well as the Secure Kernel, from user-mode, I realized that there was a dearth of concise technical content on non-PnP driver development, and especially on how the Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) fundamentally changes how such drivers can be developed. While I’ll eventually release my full tool, once better polished, on GitHub, I figured I’d share some of the steps I took in getting there. Unlike my more usual low-level super-technical posts, this one is meant more as an introduction and tutorial, so if you already consider yourself experienced in WDF driver development, feel free to wait for Part 2.