Operating system abstraction and protection layer

• US 20020174215A1
• Filed: 05/16/2001
• Published: 11/21/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 05/16/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Softricity (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Schaefer, Stuart
• Granted Patent: US 7,028,305 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/54 Interprogram communication

Abstract

The present invention provides a system for creating an application software environment without changing an operating system of a client computer, the system comprising an operating system abstraction and protection layer, wherein said abstraction and protection layer is interposed between a running software application and said operating system, whereby a virtual environment in which an application may run is provided and application level interactions are substantially removed. Preferably, any changes directly to the operating system are selectively made within the context of the running application and the abstraction and protection layer dynamically changes the virtual environment according to administrative settings. Additionally, in certain embodiments, the system continually monitors the use of shared system resources and acts as a service to apply and remove changes to system components. The present thus invention defines an “Operating System Guard.” These components cover the protection semantics required by .DLLs and other shared library code as well as system device drivers, fonts, registries and other configuration items, files, and environment variables.

Claims

1. A system for creating an application software environment without changing an operating system of a client computer, the system comprising an operating system abstraction and protection layer, wherein said abstraction and protection layer is interposed between a running software application and said operating system, whereby a virtual environment in which an application may run is provided and application level interactions are substantially removed.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein changes directly to the operating system are selectively made within the context of the running application.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the abstraction and protection layer dynamically changes the virtual environment according to administrative settings.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the system continually monitors the use of shared system resources and acts as a service to apply and remove changes to system components.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the operating system is a Windows-based operating system, and wherein all operations to the Windows Registry and .ini files are through the Win32 APL the system further comprising a means for hooking functions, whereby each time said functions are invoked another function or application intercepts the call.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the system hooks each appropriate API function to service a request whether made by an application run from a server or if made by an application against a configuration key being actively managed

7. The system of claim 1, wherein said operating system abstraction and protection layer manages the integration of multiple instances of an application by recognizing how many instances of an application are running.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein said operating system abstraction and protection layer avoids making changes on startup and shutdown unless there is only one application instance running.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein said operating system abstraction and protection layer presents an environment to an application that appears to be an installation environment without performing an installation, whereby a “

pseudo installation”

is created in which all of the settings are brought into a virtual environment at the time the application runs.

10. The system of claim 9, further comprising a means for preventing information on the client computer from interfering or modifying the behavior of an application.

11. The system of claim 9, further comprising a means for dynamically changing the virtual environment according to administrative settings.

12. The system of claim 9, wherein more than one instance of a single software application runs on the same client computer, and wherein each of said more than one instance connects to a different database

13. The system of claim 12, wherein shared, controlled contexts are provided in which at least two of said instances of a single application share one or more virtual settings.

14. The system of claim 1, further comprising a device driver monitor that receives instructions at the time of installation for a particular application.

15. The system of claim 1, further comprising a virtual Windows Registry component to provide a full function registry to an application, but prevent modification to the underlying system registry.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein the operating system abstraction and protection layer responds with a key and its value if said key and value are stored within the operating system abstraction and protection layer, if not stored, the operating system abstraction and protection layer allows the request to pass through to the Windows Registry.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein if an attempt is made to modify the value of said key, the operating system abstraction and protection layer allows the modification to occur to itself only.