More of this Feature • Page 2: About dWinLock and dGina.dll • Page 3: Storing dGina.dll inside the exe

Join the Discussion "Post your views, comments, questions and doubts to this article." Discuss!

Related Resources • Part 1 of this article • Part 3 of this article • Windows/Shell/API programming • Resources in Delphi exe

Elsewhere on the Web • dWinLock Home Page

It's been more than a year I've written an article describing how to use Delphi in order to create a "Big Brother Windows Application - going undercover: hiding from the task list, disabling task-switch, removing from the TaskBar, disabling shut down"... all using Delphi and API calls.

Many Delphi developers were happy to find all the "required" code samples in one place...
The code was great, unfortunately it was meant to work on Windows 9x, most of the "tricks" were unusable on Windows NT compatible systems (2000/XP).

For several weeks I've been searching the Internet for the simplest and yet the best solution to enable a Delphi developer to take FULL control over the Windows system - never mind whether it's Win95 or Win XP.
Today I'd like to bring your attention to a Delphi component that solves all those problems - and much more, as you'll see!    

dWinLock

dWinlock is an easy to use Delphi component for software developers to limit the access to Windows (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP). This can be achieved by disabling a variety of key combinations (such as Ctrl+Alt+Del) and by hiding and replacing elements of the Windows desktop.

dWinlock overview
dWinlock offers the following functions:

All options can be activated or deactivated during runtime. Therefore it is not necessary to reboot your system after making changes.

Using dWinlock from code
This is why you must adore the dWinLock component ... just place it on a form in your Delphi project, and set several boolean properties. For example to disable ALT-TAB (cool switch) and the Windows Key (the one that pops up the Start Menu), you simply need two lines of code:

// WinLock is the name of the // TdWinLock component Winlock.noAltTab := True; Winlock.noWINKEYS := True;

After a call to the previous two lines, the user will be unable to, let's say, start the Windows Explorer by pressing Windows Key + E; of course he wont even be able to switch between started application using ALT-TAB.    

This really works

But how? The component comes with an DLL called dGina.dll. Hm, does that mean that when deploying an application that uses dWinLick you need to deploy the dll too? Well, yes! Hm again, Delphi is known as the RAD tool that enables you to deploy (in most situations) only the application exe file to your customers. Later in this article I'll show you how to store dGina.dll inside your Delphi exe and extract it if needed! Yes, after that you again need to send only one file to your customers.

Next page > About dWinLock and dGina.dll > Page 1, 2, 3