By offering the XPS Document Application Programming Interface, Microsoft is essentially simplifying the work for print driver developers. The move comes as the Redmond company has made available the XPS Document API in unmanaged code, allowing access to devs, which had to leverage only .NET managed code in order to deliver the same printing functionality.

“If you are a Print Driver developer using the XPS Filter Pipeline, you can now use unmanaged XPS functions that were previously only available as .NET managed code. Because these functions were originally written for .NET, they could not be called from a Print driver until now,” revealed a member of the Windows Driver Kit team.

Microsoft has made sure to make a range of XPS-related resources available via MSDN, its portal for the developer community. The software giant describes the process associated with leveraging the XPS Document API for programming tasks. Developers interested in taking advantage of the XPS Document API should take a look at the XPS Document Programming Guide. In addition, the Redmond company has put together an exhaustive list with the XPS Document API's interfaces, methods, structures, and enumerators, accessible through the XPS Document Programming Reference.

“These XPS functions will enable driver developers to modify XPS documents in greater detail when they are in the filter pipeline. This will make it possible to make custom changes to the documents before they get to the printer. In addition, this API allows you to have access to the document metadata and content,” the Windows Driver Kit representative added. “This API was previously unavailable to Print Driver developers, but has been recently converted to unmanaged code and is now documented in the Windows SDK. The new documentation includes overviews of the XPS Object Model and complete coverage of all interfaces, methods, structures, and enumerators that are implemented by the XPS API.”