Developing Drivers with the Windows® Driver Foundation

How to Use Annotations

Annotations in source code significantly enhance the ability of PREfast to detect potential bugs while lowering the rate of false positives and false negatives. For example, if an annotation is added to indicate that a parameter represents a buffer of a particular size, PREfast can check for usage that would cause a buffer overrun. Annotations can be applied to functions as a whole, to individual function parameters, and to typedef declarations.

Annotations do not interfere with normal compilation on any compiler because the annotation system for PREfast uses macros. When PREfast runs, these macros expand into meaningful definitions. When the code is compiled normally, these macros expand to nothing, yielding the original ...