another Windows Firewall Control?

UPDATED TO VERSION 2.9.4

What's new in version 2.9.4
√ Fixed for Learning Mode not showing notifications on blocked connections when Windows is in a different language than english. Currently working languages are: english, german, french, finnish and spanish.
√ Fixed Autostart with Windows, which not auto starts in Windows Vista.

Known Limitations
√ Autostart with Windows works only for the current user in Windows Vista. In Windows 7 this setting applies to all users.
√ Learning Mode could generate in some situations a duplicate notification, about the same program, if that program tries to connect to internet several times in a second. For the second notification, if that will show, press Ask Me Later.
√ If the language of your Windows is not english, german, french, finnish or spanish, Learning Mode will probably not work. If you are a registered user and you have such a problem, please contact us and we will add support for your language in the next 48 hours.
√ Shell Integration is not working with standard accounts, even if it is executed with administrative privileges. Also, Autostart with Windows will not execute Windows Firewall Control on a standard account at user logon. These are limitations of the operating system, those are the privileges of standard accounts.
√ In Windows Vista, on a standard account, Internet Explorer will not connect, even there is a rule to allow it connections, if there is not also a rule to allow svchost.exe.

We are sorry to all of our registered users who had trouble with Learning Mode. Those were problems that we could not predict, because we don't have the possibility to install Windows Vista and then 7, x86 then x64, in all international languages, and test Windows Firewall Control in all environments. Again, we are sorry for any inconvenience. WFC is not perfect, but we are here to improve it, that is why we are active on this forum and in Visual Studio, at debugging and development.

Thank you for your support,
BiniSoft.org Team

 

How much memory does this app use? Also, can you clarify that the learning feature is only available to paid ($10) users?

 

Windows Firewall Control uses between, 5MB at start-up and up to 20MB in full load. These values can seem high, but we are talking about a .NET program. Anyway, it has no impact on the performance, there are .NET programs that use 800MB. Yes, Learning Mode is available to registered members only.

 

Mine averages between 2mb and 5mb. I have had it as high as 9mb but nowhere near 20mb.

 

^ This. The highest in my computer is about 10 mb.

 

Thanks guys!

 

It does poll the windows event, so I would be curious about the I/O it does (number of I/O's and read/write/other in bytes)

 

Try ProcessExplorer and Process Hacker

 

Windows Firewall Control uses 40KB of I/O only when Learning Mode is enabled. When Learning Mode is disabled, "I/O bytes history" value stays at 0.
This is not a memory leak, it is because a timer is executed every second, with no impact on performance, which reads from Event Viewer, and if a new
rule is about to be created, it writes into the Windows registry's. No worry about that. There are programs that have 500MB on I/O history.

 

Are you planning to add new functions in the next update? Like editing ports, etc.
Review from Softpedia -http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/Windows-Firewall-Control-Review-202106.shtml-

 

We currently work on version 2.9.5. The new version adds support for swedish language localization, and ports editing. You can see in the screenshot, how it looks at this moment. We will release soon a new version which will implement, finally, editable ports for the rules.

http://postimage.org/image/2pdu2ggis/

 

Looks great. Thanks for keep developing it. This is by far the best tool to use if you want to use the inbuilt Win7 firewall and by a mile IMO.

Also, thanks for hosting the older versions. Much appreciated.

 

This is very welcomed news, indeed!

 

Will we be able to install over the top of 2.9.3? About memory and I/O, I left Learning mode on for about two weeks or more and have everything setup. I forgot about turning Learning mode off, lol. Anyway, I've had it turned off for a few days now, and wfc.exe is nearly non existant. Memory dropped to a very low 300K and I/O is not even a factor with Learning mode off. This is one nice app! Congratulations on your hard work.

 

Yes, very nice effort on alexandrud's part

About the port and Protocol settings on a rule alert, very welcomed indeed

 

Cool

 

Yep,

I don't care much about memory usage. Performance is determined by I/O usage and whether or not the process spikes the CPU (a more or less constant CPU usage is also not a big issue). So good enginering Thx for the reply

 

Thx, I know, but I have not installed it, editing rules by hand with Vista/Windows 7 internal FW at the moment.

 

Will this FW work alongside NIS 2011?

 

It is not recommended to use two firewalls. They can work toghether because Windows Firewall uses it's own network filtering platform to capture the network traffic, and NIS or other firewalls, use their own network filters. But which would be the reason to have two firewalls active at the same time ? Use either one or the other. In generally, users who have adopted Windows Firewall from Windows 7 or Vista, don't want to use commercial firewalls, because they are full of bloated settings, commercials, super-mega-unimaginable upgrade offers, etc, to do the same main thing: to block/allow a program to use the internet, and to block incoming connections from the internet. I repeat, the main reason.

 

What's new in version 2.9.5

√ Added support for editing of local ports, remote ports and protocol for existing rules created with Windows Firewall Control. Be careful when you change your ports, because wrong settings can block your programs to make outgoing connections.
√ Fixed Export Policy, that could generate an unhandled exception when a standard user has no write access to temp folder.
√ Fixed for Learning Mode not showing notifications on blocked connections when Windows is in a different language than english. Currently working languages are: english, dutch, german, french, finnish, spanish and swedish.

Any feedback is welcome.

Thank you for your support,
BiniSoft.org Team

 

Dang guys your fast!
Great job!

 

Nice update! But when you close the gui and open it again, the spaces for remote, local, etc.. are blank. You have to click every rule to show them.

 

Those properties are read directly on their access, and they are not stored anywhere. I choosed this way because if the list has 100 rules, reading those properties for all of them can generate a delay of few seconds on the load of the form. A user can view properties only for selected items. I have choosed not to store them because in that way if a user modifies those properties in WFwAS, then in WFC they would be reported wrong, from the stored location. This is the way I have managed to make this work. It is better than nothing. Is hard to penetrate Windows Firewall API if you are not the one who designed it.

 

So that's way. Again thanks for the fast update!