What's New

• Added Compliance checking and system auditing functionality to the GUI with built-in search functionality.

• Added Sidebar tabbed experience with animation for ease of use. It has virtually unlimited space for new features and pages with scrollable style.

• Using MVVM design pattern.

• Native WPF GUI with no 3rd party dependency or any compiled binaries.

• When ARM hardware is detected, all process mitigations will be skipped. More info here. If you have ARM hardware and want to contribute to this project, you can help me verify each process mitigation on your ARM hardware so I can enable the ones that are compatible.

• The experience and logic for enabling logging has been improved.

• You can now manually enter the path where the logs will be saved to as well. Previously, you'd only have to use the button on the GUI to browse for one.

• Added custom tooltips for each category and sub-category in the protection tab with small meaningful details to help you decide which option to choose.

• Required PowerShell version has been increased from 7.4.2 to 7.4.4. The Harden Windows Security heavily relies on the latest .NET components shipped with PowerShell, that's why you don't need to install .NET runtime separately.

• When logging is enabled, the logs are written to the file in real time instead of at the end of the operation.

• Significantly improved the toast notifications experience, they are now modern Windows 11 style toast notifications. Due to this improved experience, 5 official Microsoft-Signed DLLs are bundled with the Harden Windows Security program. Links to them can be found below:

  • Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.Notifications
  • Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents
  • Microsoft.Windows.SDK.NET.Ref
  • System.Drawing.Common

• The Harden Windows Security program can now be fully used in both Visual Studio (native C#) and Visual Studio Code (native PowerShell). Its hybrid design allows it to be highly interoperable.

What's Next

• Unprotect-WindowsSecurity will be added to the GUI.

• Attack Surface Reduction rules will be individually configurable in a new section in the GUI.

• BitLocker enrollment and activation through the GUI.

• And more.

Resolves #318

PR: #319