Inside the Windows 95 Registry

Inside the Windows 95 Registry A Guide for Programmers, System Administrators, and Users

By Ron Petrusha
First Edition
Pages: 594
ISBN 10: 1-56592-170-4 | ISBN 13: 9781565921702

This book is OUT OF PRINT.

Book description

An in-depth examination of remote registry access, differences between the Win95 and NT registries, registry backup, undocumented registry services, and the role the registry plays in OLE. This book shows programmers how to access the Win95 registry from Win32, Win16, and DOS programs in C and Visual Basic. It includes VxD sample code and comes with a diskette that contains registry tools.
Full Description

What Windows 95 developers have been looking for! An in-depth examination of the Windows 95 registry, the new central "storage facility" for settings that replaces most of the old SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI settings found in Windows 3.x. This book covers remote registry access, differences between the Win95 and NT registries, and registry backup. You'll also find a thorough examination of the role that the registry plays in OLE, coverage of undocumented registry services, and more. Petrusha shows programmers how to access the Win95 registry from Win32, Win16, and DOS programs in C and Visual Basic. VxD sample code is also included. The book includes a diskette with registry tools such as REGSPY, a program that shows exactly how Windows applications, libraries, and drivers use settings in the registry.

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Media reviews More than one book has emerged purporting toDespite the fact that the title specifically says "Windows 95," the book covers the NT registry better than some books claiming to do it all. Other books on the say about it, beyond the published API. This book leaves you amazed the book by listing a handful of the many topics covered. saw anyone actually perform a benchmark to provide data instead of registry, this book spends some time telling you what you should put tasks, such as recording window size/position and recording a most-recently-used file list. If you think that's an obvious topic that no registry book could omit, you haven't read some of the stinkers I have. There's a large, informative section on the registry manipulations involved in setting up file associations (so the right programs are associated with the right file extensions). There's information on where to define MIME content types. There's a chapter devoted to using the registry with Visual Basic, which has its own special set of issues. Would you believe there's a chapter on accessing the Win95 registry from VxDs and 16-bit DOS or Windows applications? Amazing!

The information here is not just a parroting of facts obtainable elsewhere, but is rich in experience. For example, the documentation can tell you the location of the registry key that contains DLLs shared by more than one application; this book will tell you that, in practice, people are storing any kind of shared file (.vxd, .exe, .hlp, etc.) there.

In real life, you might need to figure out what some application is reading from the registry in order to figure out why it isn't working. The code disk includes a registry spy utility to help you do that. There's just a wealth of experience in this book, including innumberable asides that solve little mysteries about the registry and applications that use the registry.

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