Windows Firewall Control (WFC) by BiniSoft.org

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thr...-by-binisoft-org.347370/page-297#post-3191775

 

I see now what is going on. The resource is located in a package named Microsoft.Windows.ParentalControls like any others.



But for these two, the folder names don't follow the same pattern:


The folder should have been Microsoft.Windows.ParentalControls_cw5n1h2txyewy. For some reason these two packages have a mismatch between the package name and the folder name. I will tweak WFC code to handle these too. Thank you for reporting this.

 

Now I know why for so many years I didn't want to touch these Windows Store rules. They are a headache

I tweaked the code the best I could to be generic so that it can handle all packages. Below I compiled a new release candidate build which has a new algorithm which detects if a Windows Store rule is invalid or not. Before including this logic in an official release, can you please install the version 6.10.1.0 below and let me know if the Windows Store rules are now detected correctly? Thank you.

https://binisoft.org/download/rc/wfc6setup.exe

Thank you for your feedback and your support.

 

With this release candidate, I am seeing zero invalid rules beginning with @ or related to Store Apps.

 

This means it finally resolves them properly in an even more generic way from code perspective. Thank you for your confirmation. Let's wait for @Alpengreis input too on this topic.

 

@alexandrud

That seems OK now, no more marked as invalid, thank you very much!

Unfortunately I can't search for the description field. Could you implement this? Because it would be very good to search for a package name too (and also for other strings).

 

Hmm did something get reset or broken with the latest release? I normally use the medium filter - and everything is blocked. I'm having to add back all my apps/rules again.

Update - I should mention I'm also running latest Win11 Canary - 26200. So maybe something happened along with this build as well.

 

It is preferable to restart after the update, you can also re-import rules after the reinstall.

 

I will update the search to include also the Description property. I don't know how I missed this until now, because all other properties are included already in the search logic, but not the Description. It will be included in the next release.

WFC updater just stops the service and the UI, extracts the new files and starts them again. There is no need to restart the machine or anything like that.
You were on Medium Filtering profile, you did the update to the latest version. You were still on Medium Filtering profile and suddenly the existing rules did not apply anymore? What do you mean by "I'm having to add back all my apps/rules again"? Were your rules removed? Why do you have to add back your rules?

 

Never had such an issue here. The installer was always super-smooth in the update process. If I really had to nit-pick, it'd be about having to disable Log Allowed connections every time (I do remember alexandrud mentioning this is sort of unavoidable).

Oh. Windows 11 AND preview builds. Sounds like a total nightmare. You are playing with fire there.

 

Every time I boot my PC and start browsing, for example, watching a video on YouTube, Twitch, or whatever, and want to bring the WFC UI to the foreground, when I click its icon on the system tray, there's a brief ~2-second delay where the video freezes and only then does the WFC UI show up. Subsequent opening of the UI doesn't suffer from this behaviour until I repeat the process of restarting the PC/booting it up.

This happens every time I start up my PC. Is this just my system? I'd love to hear from others if they've had the same experience.

 

Most probably. Do you have security software installed? You could try adding exclusions for WFC. You should also post your system specs.

 

Very good, thank you

 

No, the updates work fine and I've had no errors/issues until now. It's like somehow rules got reset for everything when using medium profile. I've had to add all my web browsers back, RDP, MSTeams, box client, everything that was working before stopped and it's like they aren't allowed without adding them back. Maybe the latest Win11 canary build changed native firewall components or something - yes, I realize this is beta and things break, but thought you should know the behavior I'm seeing.

 

Never heard of such problem. It seems like a driver issue. Try to install the latest drivers from the manufacturer of your motherboard. In general most drivers coming from Windows Update should be enough, however they might not be always the best choice. Check also the Windows Logs -> Application subcategory in Event Log viewer. Maybe you have a warning or error logged there when this happens.

If the rules are there and they seem to not apply until you recreate them again, instead of recreating them try to switch for a second the profile from Medium to Low and then back to Medium Filtering profile. This will force Windows Firewall to refresh its internal state. Please let me know if this helps. Anyway, this doesn't seem to be related to WFC updates.

 

I'm noticing an issue where if you choose to create a temporary rule for one application, but then click "Allow this program" for the second application it creates another temporary rule for that application instead of a permanent one. To put it another way, open two applications that are currently not allowed outgoing, choose allow temporary for the first and then allow permanent for the second, both will get a temporary rule.

 

Indeed. Thank you for reporting this. Funny thing is that this is a bug that exists since forever. Nobody discovered it until now One line of code. I fixed it and it will be included in the next release.

 

Windows Firewall Control v.6.11

Change log:
- Fixed: Search functionality in Rules Panel does not include the Description property.
- Fixed: After creating a temporary rule from the notification dialog which includes multiple programs blocked, you must close the notification dialog otherwise all new rules are temporary.
- Improved: The algorithm for detecting invalid rules for Windows Store apps was updated to avoid false detections.
- Improved: The error handling and logging was enhanced on certain parts of code.

Download location: https://binisoft.org/download/wfc6setup.exe
SHA256: 16442002148e25cc009ad69e6292ce763eeb93108a9008c35019ec2ca7252f32
SHA512: e004672275ad23d7413960836b9b78cd76f5d35809ca7dc3e09442e597b755cf215d02b39596039d71b03c697a47eb042dfc2f62c25463337c2bd7985c67c59e

Thank you for your feedback and your support,
Alexandru Dicu

 

There's no security software installed. The PC in question is a bit old, so maybe that's the issue. I don't think a simple piece of software like WFC would demand such resources.

Drivers are all up-to-date. In Windows Logs -> Application there are no warnings or errors when this happens.

Here's a video of what i described so you can better understand: https://streamable.com/4q4ene

 

I can not reproduce this on my side. I even tried in a virtual machine with 1 CPU, 1 Core, 3GB RAM and the YouTube video playback does not hang when I open WFC window. Not even on such a low spec machine I could not reproduce this. The question remains, what CPU and how much RAM has this machine? Anyway, it doesn't seem like something that can be fixed from WFC code.

 

i7-4790K and 16GB of RAM.

I've remembered this behaviour for ages, it's not related to new versions of WFC. I just never reported it here, nor did I read anyone mention it.

I don't think it's a system problem, as I keep my Windows as simple as possible and only have a few things installed. It could be a hardware issue, though.

 

@yeL

1) Is that delay the case with different browsers or just with your standard browser?
2) Is that delay the case also while watching a video from a local source (not via Internet)?
3) Is that delay the case also if you opened the WFC GUI BEFORE you watch a video? (To know if it's related in combination with browser(s) only).

Greetings

 

I suggest to open a new thread to troubleshoot that issue.

 

1) Tested with Chrome, Edge, Firefox. Behavior is the same across them.
2) Good question. Hadn't thought of that. I've just tested it and it also happens with local files using a media player, so it's definitely not a browser problem.
3) If I open the WFC GUI before then there's no problem as it only occurs the first time I open the GUI. After that it works as expected until I restart/switch off the PC and do it again.

 

@yeL
THEN I think also that this could be a hardware problem. But it's of course not sure if this is really unrelated to WFC ...


@Mr.X
Since it's not REALLY clear that this is NOT related with WFC I think it's ok to post here in the WFC thread. Maybe another users will have that problem too and so it's good that it's in THIS thread.