Re: Accessing I/O Ports in Windows NT/2000

[Jeffrey Glenn <jeffrey.glenn@mail1.monmouth.army.mil>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> Jeffrey Glenn <jeffrey.glenn@mail1.monmouth.army.mil> wrote in message news:<3C45FC6C.2030208@mail1.monmouth.army.mil>...
> 
>>I've found that accessing the I/O ports on Windows 9x is rather easy, 
>>but with Windows NT/2000 input and output instructions are privileged 
> 
> That's right. NT doesn't allow direct access to the hardware from a
> user-mode program. If you want to do that, you have to write a Windows
> device driver.
> 
>>Does anyone know of an Ada solution to accessing I/O ports on Windows 
>>NT/2000?
> 
> This isn't a language issue, its an OS issue. What you need to figure
> out is how to write a device driver for NT-class OS's. Anything you
> learn about that can be translated into Ada quite easily.
> 
> Good places to get started are the Microsoft DDK website
> (http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/ ) , and the newsgroups
> comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.drivers
> (http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.drivers)
> and comp.os.ms-windows-programmer.nt.kernel-mode
> (http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.nt.kernel-mode
> ).

I was (am) hoping that I would not have to learn about writing device 
drivers for Windows NT. I realize that Ada doesn't provide these 
facilities, but I hoped to find that someone had already written such an 
interface/wrapper package. Ada also doesn't support ODBC, TCP/IP, nor 
Windows for that matter, but a lot has been written to bind with them.

Oh well, I guess I have to to be the first one sometimes.