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The CodePlex site has been created, and initial demo code uploaded, for the Bio Approval Workflow (aka Secure Purchase Order System, or SPOS) sample. See here.

The current code implements a native Win32 command-line tool that calls the Windows 7 Biometric Service API. Specifically, WinBioIdentifyWithCallback and related routines. Kudos to the Microsoft Windows Security product group folks for making the ramp-up relatively painless.

A few specific notes about that ramp-up. First, don’t forget to install the latest Windows 7 SDK and DDK. Confusingly, you need the DDK even for the basic client-side user-mode components (including winbio.h and winbio.lib). Technically, I’m not even sure that you need the Win 7 SDK for this, but the current sample assumes that it’s there.

Second, for reference, I previously blogged about the fingerprint reader being used for testing. No problems.

Third, as I mentioned in the above post, my current Win 7 test machine is 64-bit. I briefly forgot that fact, and tried running a 32-bit version of the above command-line sample. It threw a WOW exception and failed to run. I see a copy of winbio.dll in %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64, so I’m not sure why it failed, and I made no attempt to debug. Anyway, we’ll be sure that all of our samples build and run natively on 64-bit, so this should be an edge case at best.

Fourth, the current plan is to constrain the SPOS target scenarios to AD domain-based user accounts only. Thus, the sample code has only been tested in that scenario.

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1 Comment »

  1. Hi Dan,

    I’ve started working on a Windows Biometric based app too (I went straight for managed, though, and going to PInvoke my way through :-), and naturally, I couldn’t find the winbio.h in the SDK and the DDK for W7 is in closed beta. Can you by any chance post the .h files on codeplex/email them to me/or just post the interesting bits somewhere(flags/structs/enums defs., etc.)
    10x in advance.

    Comment by Ronen — February 5, 2009 @ 1:17 pm

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