Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework

Accessing the Registry

The Windows registry is perhaps the most abused feature in the various flavors of the Windows operating system. Just about any application that needs to save some configuration value writes it to the registry and the rather awful end result is that you end up with a massively bloated registry, which considerably and quite noticeably slows down your computer. That said, the registry is really a nice centralized place to save data, and the use or abuse of it depends totally on your overall program design. As developers, we can think of the registry as a treelike structure consisting of registry-keys, where each key can have subkeys as well as values. Typically, we access the registry using the Registry access API functions ...