Reliving the Past - The Visitor Access Kiosk

 Monday, May 11, 2015
Every once in a while I like to google myself as past posts will show. One thing I have never looked for was a small promotional video that Global Crossing had sent to a few folks about a project I handled for them. We had a new office being built in Rochester, NY around the time that we were involved in a program with Microsoft for helping them improve the developer experience around Lync.
Before this sounds horribly boastful
This project was a defining moment for me as a developer. I had, up to this point, been mostly focused in Web/Database applications that were used internally. I had quite a few wins in this area, but nothing that ever extended beyond the walls of the company (beyond a project a few years ago that was sold to a vendor of ours whilst we were in the throws of Bankruptcy).
Stupidly, I had never thought to just "google it". At the time, Global Crossing didn't put videos on YouTube, and I'm not entirely sure how it even got there. It was a *monumental* task and I was *not* the right developer to be doing it, but I love code and I love solving hard problems (from time to time). In this case, the VP of our department (an awesome guy who's name I'm omitting because I haven't asked for his permission), asked if I could create a kiosk that would allow a visitor to contact someone in the office from a secure visitor lobby, have a video/voice conversation with them (one way video, inbound to the employee only), would print a one-day-use badge with their picture, name and relevant information and give them a way to sign out when their visit was over. This was to replace the need for a dedicated receptionist, or a pen/paper log-book.
Some implementation details
Unfortunately, the only copy of the original whitepaper has been removed from Microsoft's site -- it was for Office Communicator 2007 R2 (technically we ran it on this version, but it was developed targeting the pre-release of R2), so I'll include that here
I implemented it as a WPF application, touch-only (at a time when a 1024x768 SAW touch screen was $1500). I used a barcode scanner, a simple label printer attached to a USB -> Ethernet device, a Logitech camera, and a ThinkCenter PC running Windows XP (stripped of everything unnecessary, including the Explorer shell.  All of the code was my work (that's a statement of fact, not pride -- I would be embarrassed by that code today).  My good friend and former coworker George Morell and I handled the operating system hardening -- when you have a guy at your disposal that can tell you the location of every obscure OS registry setting from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.1, you defer to that incredible expertise. And our security guys did some network hardening to ensure that if someone took a sledgehammer to the device and grabbed its ethernet port, it'd be worthless to them.

Most of the application was written in C# (.Net 3.5, I think, I remember thinking ... "generics?" ... like "templates in C++?"... no ... not exactly) with some bits in C and one really nasty bit in C++ (it was the camera interface). It was not a difficult thing to write, but at the time, it was a difficult thing fore me to write.
Without further ado, the Visitor Access Kiosk.

 The guy in the video is my former boss, he worked out of the Rochester, NY office where it was filmed. I had nothing to do with the video or its upload to YouTube. Who knows, it may get taken down, but for the time being, I wanted to have a link to it that I could refer to.

I had to laugh while watching it. The UI is comical today, but keep in mind that this was developed at a time before Windows 7 was released. Windows Vista and Windows XP's "chrome" were the inspiration behind the design. And I had some fun with XAML.

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