Presenting at Windows Core Workshop 2010, Beijing, China

By Alexander Schmidt

Taking place for the fourth time, the Microsoft Research Asia Windows Core Workshop brings together faculty from around the world and Microsoft kernel experts to provide information about and exchange experiences in Windows technologies for teaching operating systems.

As the WRK and CRK community is pretty active in the Asia/Pacific region, we are extremely proud to be invited to give a presentation about our experiences with the WRK here at HPI. Here is the abstract of Alexander's talk.

The Windows Research Kernel (WRK) was released in 2006. Since then, at the Operating Systems and Middleware group at HPI, we have been using the WRK as a valuable complement to the Windows Internals Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK). However, although the WRK was especially designed for academia, it is still a software product that has to be carefully adapted to fit into the curriculum. The biggest challenges in this regard were the sheer complexity of the kernel, the high configuration overhead prior to usage, and the lack of suitable experiments, which we consider essential for teaching operating systems.

In this talk, we present our hands-on methodology for teaching operating systems and the lessons we learned from using the WRK in the classroom. We, therefore, designed and implemented a couple of projects that align nicely with the CRK and that help students easily master kernel programming projects inside the WRK. The talk concludes with interesting results of a survey among our students and some thoughts on and suggestions of future directions for the WRK we would be delighted to see.

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