Product Description

The Windows NT Registry Guide will provide you with guidelines for accessing, maintaining, and utilizing the Registry. The first part of this book explains how to edit the Registry as well as how to program to it. The second part of the book unveils the mysterious information stored in the Registry and how that information affects your application development. It covers the Registry's role in relation to a number of emerging technologies you will be using (if you aren't already), including DCOM and ActiveX.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4066579 in Books
• Published on: 1997-05-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 271 pages

Amazon.com Review
For programmers, Chen and Berry have created an excellent introduction to the Windows NT 4.0 Registry in Windows NT Registry Guide. Lacking a complete catalog of keys, this book's value lies instead in its exhaustive documentation of the Registry API and its examples--included on a companion disk--of accessing and modifying Registry information in Visual Basic and C++ programs, including ActiveX controls. The authors begin with the obligatory explanation of the Registry's functions and documentation of Registry Editor. They quickly move on to provide a full documentation of the Registry API, a helpful tool unfortunately marred by unclear organization. Still, this book partially redeems itself with its discussions of Registry- accessing programs in both C++ and Visual Basic and documentation of the Registry entries related to NT's Internet Information Server (IIS) and ActiveX controls.

From the Inside Flap
The Registry is a central storage location that is part of the Window NT 4.0 operating system. It contains state and configuration information about a computer and its applications and operating system. It also contains information about the computer's user.

Although seemingly only a simple indexed database, the Registry is actually a very powerful resource originally designed to be used only by the operating system and other applications. It was never intended to be accessed by a user. Some people may disagree with this last statement. However, we offer the following arguments to support this view:

~ No applications for viewing or modifying the Registry are visible on the Desktop. A Registry Editor is shipped with Windows NT and Windows 95, but no icon for it is placed on the Desktop, on the task bar, or even in the Control Panel. This seems to indicate that the user is not supposed to know about or use the Registry.

~ The programming APIs to the Registry are more involved and better than the Registry Editor. This indicates that it is more important for programs to use the Registry than for a user to access it.

We feel that users were never intended to use the Registry because modification of the Registry could destroy the operating system. And destroying the operating system is the worst thing a user can do to a computer through software. The system can be recovered only by reinstalling it, plus all applications that had run on it. For this reason, we strongly urge you to back up your computer's Registry before you begin to implement any of the procedures and suggestions we offer in this book. Instructions for doing this are in Chapter 1.

Because the Registry seems to be inaccessible, it may appear to users to be a mysterious place full of secrets. It's not. Editing the Registry is easy, much like using Explorer to edit files. And programming it is straightforward, similar to using Microsoft Foundation Classes. The only real mystery involved is the information it contains. And in this book, we help you sort through that.

Use of the Registry to store state information is growing in popularity for several reasons:

~ As software companies upgrade their applications, they are changing their state saving mechanism from .ini files to the Registry. Since the number of software companies is increasing and the Registry is the "place to be," there will be more application development that incorporates the Registry.

~ As PCs grow more powerful, they are increasingly being used as servers. However, most servers have limited graphical user interfaces. Hence, the Registry is being used to store the configuration information for the servers. It's a good location for this information because most servers are services, and services start running before a user even logs on.

~ As Microsoft continues to aggressively promote the use of OLE technology, via such products as OLE databases and OLE transaction processing, the Registry will become increasingly important. This is because each OLE object extensively uses the Registry.

These developments make the Registry a popular and busy place.

This growing popularity of the Registry means developers must understand the Registry and have applications that talk to it. For example, if you write OLE code then you will have to be able to clean up the mess it makes. Organization of the Book

As the title implies, this book is a guide to the vast amount of information stored within the Windows NT Registry. The Registry is a key component of the Windows NT operating system that stores and control the access of information used to initialize and configure Windows NT applications. All technologies on the Windows NT platform also make extensive use of the Registry. The Windows NT Registry is the mechanism that allows applications to seamlessly integrate so many powerful technologies.

The Windows NT Registry Guide covers the information that enables the developers to see how this integration is possible through the use of the Windows NT Registry subkeys and name value pairs. Following is a more detailed description of each chapter in this book. Chapter 1

In this chapter, we discuss what the Registry is used for and its database structure. We also define a key and describe how information is stored. Also discussed are the Registry's predecessors-their downfalls and why they were replaced. We further include a little about the files that make up the Registry and how all the pieces of the Registry interact. We end with instruction on how to back up the Registry and how to restore the back up. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is all about the Registry Editor, the only tool that Microsoft provides for editing the Registry. The Registry Editor is straightforward to use because it is much like the file editor Explorer. It is important for understanding the Registry because it gives a visual representation to the abstract database. Chapter 3

Chapter 3 details the Registry APIs provided by Microsoft so that applications written in C++ can access the Registry. Because accessing the Registry is more important to applications than to users, the APIs are more robust than the Registry Editor. It is important to master the APIs before going on to Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4

Chapter 4 focuses on how to use the Registry using the Win32 Registry API through the Visual Basic programming language. Visual Basic developers can learn how to properly use the Registry API, since how to do this isn't that straightforward from Visual Basic. After studying this chapter and its examples, a Visual Basic developer will have the knowledge needed to take advantage of the NT Registry. Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, we cover how to write DLLs and executables that register themselves. We also include examples of two applications that use the Registry to interact with other applications: the Event Log and the Performance Monitor. We show you how to write to the Event Log and have your applications monitored by the Performance Monitor. More important, we discuss how they interact with other applications through the Registry. This type of interaction is a good example of Registry programming at its finest and should be used as a model for your applications. Chapter 6

Chapter 6 describes the intricate role the Registry plays in supporting the ActiveX technology and its subtechnologies. The chapter covers the various identifier types and component categories contained within the Registry for use by ActiveX. Chapter 7

Chapter 7 discusses programming extensions to the NT shell. You can extend the shell by writing handlers for various custom functions. The shell knows the handlers exist by reading the Registry. NT shell extension programming is a powerful tool. It also is an example of exposing COM (component object model) objects to an application through the Registry. In this case, the application is the shell and the handlers are COM objects. This is a another great model on which to base your Registry work.

0201694735P04062001

From the Back Cover
0201694735B04062001

Customer Reviews

Decent content, but poorly put together
This book contains some useful information, but it is poorly organized and very sloppy. It is hard to quickly find specific API calls and it is loaded with errors.

If you are buying this for the API documentation, the MSDN documentation is much better. Some of the API documentation is blatantly wrong, and the example code is full of errors.

Overall I was not impressed. This book could be good in the next edition if they check their code, organize the book better, and do a bit more editing!