Lost and need direction please

[smarsh]

Hi,

We are web/Flash people but were asked if we can take on a project that I would describe as creating a shell environment for Windows (probably XP), to hide the normal Windows Interface.

The idea is for the company's employees to work in this environment and only have access to limited local apps. and never the Windows desktop or any other part of the OS. We would create a company branded graphic "overlay" with buttons to the apps (say MS Word or whatever) and the apps would open in a window (area) inside the overlay and function as normal.

We know how to make Flash full screen and pull data or video into it, but no idea on how to do this.

Is this even possible? Is it a C or VB or Adobe Air or what type of project? Has anyone done this before? Is this risky?

I appreciate your help guys.

Thanks.

[writetonsharma]

Yes this is going to be a big project creating a virtual desktop and hiding the real one.

to go into some of the details of the complexity:
1. what you will be doing is creating a windows which will be always on top with no minimize or maximize button.
2. to disable access to other parts of the windows you will catch all keyboard keys like alt+ctrl+del (which the user can use to kill your application, windows+d (which can take the user to desktop) and other shortcuts which the user can use to bypass your application.
3. now you will be creating other things in your application like menus, icons which the user can use to open application, or if he wants to add any application to your virtual desktop you have to give provision for that.
4. users can access the file system from other applications also like opening browse from ms office which you cannot stop.
4. all the windows will be running inside your desktop as their childs. All this can be built using windows programming/MFC but will be long, expensive and obviously not bug free at the beginning.

First make clear what you exactly want to do because there are tools and software's which can help you achieve this.

[george135]

> Yes this is going to be a big project creating a virtual desktop and hiding the real one.

No, just replace the default Windows Shell (explorer, reg) with anything you want.

[chrisname]

That's what I was thinking... Just rename explorer.exe to explorer.old and rename yours to explorer.exe... Simple once you've written the shell itself. Or there may be a registry key so you don't even have to do that -- then you could have an batch file, setup.bat:

@ECHO off
ECHO Move <executable> to %windir%\system32
MOVE <executable> %windir%\system32\<executable>
ECHO Done. Set system to recognise new executable...
REG ADD <key> <REG_SZ> <value>
ECHO Done. Setup complete.

Simple.