WIA Driver Components

The WIA minidriver can be viewed as two logical layers:

  • The WIA service interface layer

  • The device communication layer

The following diagram illustrates the logical breakdown of a WIA minidriver and its components.

diagram illustrating a wia minidriver and its components.

WIA Minidriver Interfaces

A WIA minidriver is a COM object that implements the IUnknown COM interface and two WIA-specific COM interfaces: IStiUSD and IWiaMiniDrv. The WIA minidriver interface layer implements these interfaces and is the entry point into the WIA minidriver. Applications do not call the WIA minidriver interfaces directly; only the WIA service calls into these interfaces.

Device Communication

The device communication layer is responsible for low-level interactions with the still image device through a kernel-mode bus driver. All interactions with the device are sent through this layer. This layer is responsible for packaging data to be sent to the device into a format that the physical device can understand, and for unpackaging data received from the device into a format that the driver understands.

This sections provides additional information about the WIA minidriver and its components in the following areas:

WIA Minidriver Interfaces

Device Communication through the Bus Driver

WIA Components