Thursday, August 27, 2015

Windows 10 (IoT Core) Driver deployment

Hi Folks,

When deploying a device driver to a Windows 10 target (Pro and IoT Core) using Visual Studio 2015, you may encounter the error Test group "Driver Installation" contains no active tests that can be executed on target machine xxxxxx:


In the solution explorer, right click on your project, and open the properties. In the Configuration Properties, you will find Driver Install. It contains an item named Deployment.
In this item, you will find the Driver Installation Options, having the choice between Manual Install and SPKG install.


The default value is Manual Install. The other option, SPKG Install, deploys the driver using a .spkg file, which is a  standalone module containing the driver package.
If you try to set this option to SPKG Install without having generated a .spkg package, you will encounter the following error "The SPKG output directory xxxx doesn't contain any SPKG." :
 
You will then change the value back to Manual Install, and that is when the error will start to appear. Even after having reset the properties of your project, the SPKG Install option will have left an effect on your target. You can see this impact in the file .vcxproj.user associated to your projet. To find it, in the Solution Explorer, right click on your project and select "Open Folder in File Explorer". You will find several files. Rename your ProjectName.vcxproj.user to  ProjectName.vcxproj.user.old to keep it in case of problem. Then try one more time to deploy your driver to the target. A new .vcxproj.user file will be generated by VS2015 and the error should disappear.
You can now deploy your drivers correctly.

Enjoy!

- Nicolas & Leo

1 comment:

  1. Thanks I got stuck on that same point! This is clearly all work in progress still at Microsoft. Nice workaround.

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