Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Programming with Visual Basic

Visual Basic used to be regarded as a toy language, in large part because that’s what it was. In true Microsoft tradition, though, it has been continually enhanced, revised, tweaked, and improved to the point where it’s a real honest-to-goodness programming tool. While hard-core programmers may look down their noses at any language with “Basic” in its name, many administrators have come to know and love VB because it makes it extremely easy to construct robust applications with the full Windows look and feel.

Besides that, VB includes a wide range of components that allow it to easily connect to large databases, generate custom reports, and do a number of other things that are much more difficult to do in C++ (or even Perl, unless you’re already fluent). A good friend of mine described VB by saying that its learning curve didn’t reach as high as Visual C++, but it was a lot flatter at the bottom.

While you could use VB to write a tool whose purpose was to manipulate the Registry, it’s more likely that you’ll need to add Registry access to a VB program you already have (or are writing). Accordingly, in this section I focus on how to get data into and out of the Registry; that means opening and closing keys, enumerating keys and values, querying and setting values, and deleting keys and values. If you want to do anything else, you can do so using the API definitions discussed next.

Tip

As in the sections on C++ and Perl above, I’m going to assume that ...