Re: square bullets

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:3mgv42p9dnmuuj5lnqulunglk5e5qbql14@xxxxxxxxxx
I've never quite understood why we had to switch to a registry
approach.

For a single user, the only particularly good benefit that I can think of is
that it makes backing up programs' settings somewhat easier, because they're
all held in one place. When you get into company environments with many users
with different hardware configurations, it's a lot easier to configure
software when all of their settings are in one known spot (the registry)
rather than in an unpredictable directory somewhere (since different machines
and users will typically have their software installed in different
locations).

For years and years INI files sufficed quite nicely. Some of my
"golden-oldies" work just fine under XP with just an INI file.

INI files don't allow multiple levels of hierarchy, and while I'd readily
admit that software guys seem to often like to impose somewhat artificial
hierarchies, software development today does consist of a lot of "drag and
drop" design, and if each control needs to store its own settings somewhere,
it's a lot easier for that control to have a specified place to do so (the
registry again of course) rather than somehow having to interact with the
"main" program whenever settings need to be stored. A good example would be,
say, a toolbar button control that saves its position and what all the buttons
on the toolbar are -- it's a lot cleaner if the toolbar button control class
worries about saving all that information and the program it's a part of
doesn't need to know. Although I wouldn't suggest it's pretty, having 50
different registry branches to store all this information is probably better
than having 50 different .ini files floating around your hard drive.

The registry approach was created in an attempt to solve some real problems
with INI files, although I think the solution wasn't as good as was initially
envisioned. If XML had already been around when Microsoft was cooking up the
registry, perhaps they would have used that instead.


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