First published on MSDN on Aug 29, 2018
One of the consistent themes the Hardware Dev Center team hears from the Partner Community is the need for an easy way to automate the lifecycle of submitting and publishing drivers. This is especially true for partners with large volumes, because they need a way to build, sign, package and publish drivers within their existing build and release management processes. To address this feedback, we had published APIs for
submission
in April. Continuing with that story, we have now added
APIs for publishing drivers in Hardware Dev Center
. This is now available to all partners and allows you to create Shipping Labels.
What can I do with APIs?
Microsoft Hardware API are now available for Hardware Dev Center. You can use these REST APIs to
-
Submit drivers
-
Download signed drivers
-
Create/upload derived submissions
-
Check status of an existing submission
-
Check status of a shipping label
-
Create a shipping label
-
Edit a shipping label
How to onboard/start using it?
Read through the
documentation
to understand the methods available, request response types for each of these and how to call them. The documentation also contains sample code on how to use the API. Since these are REST APIs, you should be able to easily onboard to them without the need to change the technology you already use in-house.
How do I get access?
The APIs can be accessed using your existing Azure AD account by associating an Azure AD application with your Windows Dev Center account. If you are already using Microsoft Store analytics API or Microsoft Store submission API, you could reuse the same credentials to access the Microsoft Hardware API as well.
What are early adopters saying?
Early adopters of the APIs have been able to onboard, test and start using the APIs. They have been able to save time and increase productivity. Some snippets of feedback
“Prompt and superfast. Status poll is prompt. Able to publish multiple OSes with 2700 HWIDs in one shot. No timeouts or any other issues noticed in the perf”
“We were able to automatically upload and then download our signed package in just 10 mins, and everything was smooth and straightforward. This API will definitely save our Cert Engineers meaningful cycles pretty much every day now that we no longer have to do this manually.”
“The APIs have reduced the cycle time for our end to end signing process from days to 75 minutes.”
What's next?
In the coming months, we will be releasing APIs for advanced driver search. Stay tuned for more updates.
Happy automating!
