How to control user interaction with desktop features

Question

I wan to create an application that runs a fullscreeen interactive presentation. The user must not be able to close, minimize, background the application, nor access any system facilities (e.g, desktop, task manager etc.). This access can be granted only by the application, for example by a password protection.

Is it possible to implement these limitations to user interaction on a  Windows 8 Tablet device?

Answer 1

It looks like you are looking for a kiosk app functionality. That's baked into Windows and it's called Assigned Access. You can assign a specific user with a specific app to start. No other system functionality is available. When the app crashes, it's restarted automatically.

There was a session on //build explaining that.

I have written a blogpost how to do it for Windows 8. Remember if you want to do this with Windows 10, it only works with UWP apps with the 'above lockscreen' setting (see this best practices article).

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Martin Tirion - UX Evangelist @ Microsoft <If this answers your question, please mark this as answer>

Answer 2

If you want the application to be able to programmatically allow the user to interact with the rest of the system at some point, you'll want to use CBT Hooks (and it will be quite complicated programming).  If you don't, mtirion's suggestion is the way to go.

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WinSDK Support Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/

Answer 3

Thanks.

That should work fine. Sometimes just the buzz words are missing.