Windows Registry - Villain or Hero
I know it comes in for quite a bit of villification, but when you stop to think about it the Windows registry is in many respects a good idea. Having a single central repository for application configuration information can be kind of useful. I recently wrote a tool which needed to interact with another application and change some of its configuration information. The application doesn't provide any nice API I can hook into to enable me to do this but by tweaking the values of certain registry keys I can get exactly that behaviour. As the registry is a central store of information I had a pretty good idea where to go looking.
Where the Windows registry falls down is that there's just so much stuff in it and its hard to know what all those keys and values do. Some of them you don't ever want to touch (or the developer's don't want you to touch!), but others give you a powerful way of controlling application behaviour. Maybe what the registry needs is to take a leaf out of the object-orientation book. Essentially registry keys provide another interface to the application, but one that isn't documented. If there were some way to document this interface, perhaps through meta-data attached to the keys, it would become significantly more usable - a proper interface with definitions and contractual behaviours and so on. Of course some applications store stuff in the registry that they don't want users messing about with so maybe we need the idea of encapsulation and private members too. An application could declare some private keys which can only be modified by itself or the system, and some documented public keys which users and other applications can use to customize the application. If application developers could also specify allowable ranges of values for public keys too the registry would be a great tool!
Chances of this ever being implemented? Not sure. Microsoft are advocating a move away from the registry with technologies like .NET, but there will be plenty of application still using the registry for the foreseeable future and it would great if something could be done to make it a bit more user friendly. Of course if it was more user friendly that would lead my relatives to go fiddling with their PC's more leading to more 'family tech support' calls for me. Maybe it's not such a good idea after all...
David
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