Here’s some new tools up the sleeves of Microsoft programmers…. PreFast for Drivers and Static Driver Verifier to make stable kernel drivers and avoid dreaded Blue Screen of Deaths

Microsoft is readying two tools to help hardware makers create more stable and secure Windows drivers, which should help lessen the number of crashes. The tools, PreFast for Drivers and Static Driver Verifier, are source code analysis tools that find common flaws in driver source code, so they can be fixed. Second beta versions were released at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here this week, alongside new trials of Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn.”

“We’re hoping that reliability and robustness for drivers will improve,” Jon Hagen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Static Driver Verifier, said in an interview at WinHEC. “There is a need because of the complexity of writing kernel drivers…We’re doing this to avoid blue screens.”

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