Windows 95 Class Installers and Network Driver Installers

Windows 95 uses Class Installers to install drivers for all hardware classes. The system Plug and Play and the Device Manager send messages to the various class installers to tell them to add, remove or configure specific hardware. The network class installer (Netdi.dll) is provided by Windows 95 to install all network-related hardware and software components. The network installer also allows an individual driver to have its own private installer function--so that when messages are sent from the system to the network class installer, the network class installer can in turn send specific messages to individual NDIs. The messaging interface between the network class installer and the NDIs is called NDI.

You can use a custom NDI procedure to do any or all of the following:

• Provide custom property sheet pages for configuring your driver
• Save your custom driver configuration information out to the registry or other system files
• Perform driver-specific configuration validation that can't be specified in INF files, such as verifying that certain other system drivers or applications are also installed.
• Parse setup batch script parameters.