Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Herman Richard Forrest, Iii

Frank Gorgenyi

Justin Allen Hutchings

Michael P Fenelon

Guillermo Eduardo Guillen

J Adrian Lannin

Platform neutral device protocol techniques are described in which functionality to customize device interactions through communication busses is made accessible through platform independent script-based infrastructure. Functionality provided by an operating system to manipulate standard protocols of a communication bus used to interact with a connected device is exposed as script-based objects. Script-based protocol definition files associated with connected device may be employed to customize device protocols for the communications using the functionality exposed through the script-based objects. A computing device may acquire a protocol definition file for a particular device in various ways and host the protocol definition file via a suitable run-time platform. Requests for interaction with the particular device may then be handled using the custom protocols defined by the hosted protocol definition file.

Platform neutral device protocols

Bidirectional (bidi) extension techniques for USB and/or other similar busses/connections are described in which an interface is provided to enable bidirectional communication with connected devices. The interface may be implemented as an operating system component to handle bidi communication for devices from multiple different independent hardware vendors (IHVs). Device drivers for different devices can be configured to include extension files in accordance with an established schema for bidi communication. The extension files describe supported bidi attributes, capabilities of the device, and how to make calls into the device. The interface operates to detect the extension files and set-up a corresponding device for bidi communication. Applications then interact through the interface to access, retrieve, and set configuration and status data for connected devices. The use of extension files enable creation of architecture independent devices drivers that can be used across different platforms with substantially no changes.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Herman Richard Forrest, Iii