NiCap Windows Device Driver

In brief, The NiCap is an aggregate of three DeviceDriver objects of different types. The Base one among them is a Protocol driver, that may be bound to existing in the system drivers for networking devices (Miniport drivers). The Second one is a Miniport driver, that has the behaviour as a virtual NIC adapter driver (in fact all other drivers cannot find out in any way that it is not a driver of a physically existing NIC adapter). The protocol drivers in the system are bound to it (for instance TCP/IP; NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, etc.). The Third one is a standard Kernel-Mode driver, that controls the links between User Level and NiCap via dispatching the User requests towards the different subdrivers of NiCap.

The Networking Subsystem of WinNT contains several types of drivers: drivers of NIC adapters, protocol drivers, services and intermidia drivers. All of them are controlled trough a system library NDIS, that maintains the links between them. The Program, that interactively creates and tunes these links is called NCPA (Network Control Panel Application).

In order certain Network driver to be installed, its corresponding installation script must describe the characteristics and the type of the driver in Registry, NCPA analyzes this information for all Network components described and constructs the way of binding between them.

As The NiCap is not a standard driver, unfortunately we cannot use some of the sample Microsoft .INF scripts (may be the .INF script of DialUp Adapter comes a little bit closer to our case). IMPORTANT NOTE: that's why, in order to fasten the receiving tests of the driver and to assure the joint work of the teams in both companies we shall give the procedures for the manual installation of NiCap, that we use in the moment, and we shall give the installation scripts immediately after their end approval here.

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Last updated: Jan 10, 2006 (Ver: 1.0)