[Release 1.2] ClassicLogonShell 2!

Fingerprint/biomentric would likely be a challenge unless you are able to find a way to force the biometric scanner output into a line of text which is itself used as the password- but biometrics are slightly different every time they are measured and it only requires a certain percentage of resemblance to the sample to work. You would need a separate program which would input your password as a keystroke if and when the biometric is approved. This could maybe be done with .net or C++ but you would have to hook it to winlogon.exe or something similar to make it run while you are not logged in. To my knowledge this is kind of already how biometrics are managed in Windows, at least it was that way on Windows XP.

As for XP/Vista/7 style, this program has the ability for you to make your own themes. To style the Window frames themselves, you should probably learn how to use one of the basicthemer distros. In terms of the fullscreen logon styles, that is a much broader thing than this program was ever designed to do in the first place. I'm not saying it can't or won't be done, but I wouldn't expect it because we already have other devs working on their own programs for this exact purpose. I think it would be better to focus on optimising the code that already exists and adding more classic features before adding fullscreen ui elements, especially while others are already doing this.

No I am not the dev, but we do work together on this program often. The actual dev may have a completely different answer.

arutztele05
Okay, first things first: Biometric support. This is kinda just... beyond the scope of what I can do, honestly. As herit://that1cutie and leet said, to do something like this it would either mean

1.It would be up to CLS to read the data from a biometric device, which would require CLS to be able to interact with said device, and I have seen just what kind of hoops you have to jump through to just read a chip on an ID card, let alone what kinds of arbitrary interfaces each manufacturer of these kinds of devices requires you to implement; also, it would require CLS to know your password, which is something I would like to avoid at all costs, since the security implications from something like that are massive.

Or

2.CLS would have to tell Windows to switch to the prefered method of login, which would have to be done by interacting with the UI, which given just how janky it is to just select a user and input a password, this is something that I am skeptical as to whether or not it would even be possible to do reliably using the tools that I have at my disposal right now.

As for the customizable interface, that's a different discussion, since as herit://that1cutie said, this is going quite far from the original scope of this project. Though, I have to admit that I think it would be a great idea for people to be able to create completely custom interfaces for CLS.
leet : Your idea seems pretty interesting but I have a couple of reservations on it:

1. I genuinely have no idea on how to implement such an interface
2. There's also a lot of behaviors that rely on both interface and backend code to be kinda mixed to work right, and to be able to separate these two would require a lot of time.
3. Wouldn't implementing this also mean that, to be able to render an entirely custom interface, that it would have to interact with CLS's backend through some sort of custom calls, and you'd have to create a sort-of rendering engine from scratch?

I actually think that there might be a good compromise that I thought of some time ago but never attempted to implement:

How about, instead of COM interfaces, which only someone which knows atleast a little bit of programming would be able to create, why not just use a web rendering engine to do this?
Let me explain:
What I thought would be a safer bet, would be to create a form with just one WebBrowser-like component that occupies the entire screen, and then let people make the custom interface design and behaviors through the use of HTML, JS, and CSS.
This make it easier for people to actually make such an interface, because they're languages that are much more flexible than 'real' programming languages to actually make a UI with, and all they would have to do is add in their scripts a few calls to the functions that would actually handle the backend login process.
I think that it would also be easier for me to implement, since i'd just have to group all of the code that handles the login within a couple of functions, and leave all of the rendering and interface behaviors up to the web renderer and the themes.
I think that it would also be safer than loading a DLL, since all of these markup languages wouldn't need to be decompiled to be looked into, and you could spot some malicious code very easily.

But I might be kinda biased towards this option, since most of my programming background is actually web-related, so I am more familiar with HTML, CSS and JS than with C#.

Lastly, there one final hurdle with every single thing I've mentioned so far: Time. To do any of this, I would need a lot of it, and time is a resource that I am really strapped for at the moment, since I have my final exams this year. If anyone wants to contribute to the project by actually coding some of this stuff or other functionality, and would be so kind as to send that code to me, I would gladly implement it and credit you. But as things stand right now, I personally don't have enough time to really take care of this project unfortunately, so you might have to wait for any of this stuff to be done until atleast late this summer. Sorry.

Because you have to change the theme of SYSTEM, not of the current user

I too have wondered this.

Not sure what to do about the caption height, but I seem to be experienceing that too. Unsure if it is related to CLS2. If you want, you can send me the theme and I'll take a look at it. I was able to make a theme a while back for my build that I'm still using.

I did the exact same thing when I made my theme.

It isn't designed to work with console logon and won't work with it.