HookApplication ressurection & Elevator update

Maybe some of you remember 2 projects I had in past:

1.) HookApplication was concept I always wanted to ressurect. It allows you to specify some actions to execute before application and after application is executed. Or even better, to execute something instead of application ;) Principle was simple – HookApplication acted as debugger for application you wanted to change, so it was always trapped – doesn’t matter whether you run application directly, using shortcut or from different application. Which is very powerful and allows you for example to replace Internet Explorer with Firefox – even in case iexplore.exe is hardcoded to application.

2.) Elevator allowed you to elevate application without getting UAC prompt (selectively).

 

What I always wanted was to combine both projects – that would allow you to do whatever you want, for example lock some applications with passwords, track their usage, replace them with different applications – and in combination with Elevator also specify per-process rules (always silently elevate mmc.exe for example).

I decided I will refresh HookApplication and rewrite it to full .NET application. It shouldn’t be really big issue and I expect we should see first version this month. Integration with Elevator is really simple afterwards – in fact you don’t need to do anything, just create simple plugin.

I learned a lot from both Elevator and HookApplication, so I think it shouldn’t be really hard to rewrite HA and add support for Elevator afterwards.