Registry handling with .NET

Introduction

Well, apparently the registry seems to have lost some of its importance with the arrival of .NET, at least that's the impression I seem to get. But luckily for us, Microsoft has given us two nice classes for doing just about anything we want to do with the registry. The classes are Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey and Microsoft.Win32.Registry. They have both been put into the Microsoft.Win32 namespace as you can see because the registry is totally Microsoft Win32 specific. Without too much fuss, let's get into business and try and do some of the stuff we normally do with the registry.

Reading the registry

//The Registry class provides us with the 

// registry root keys

RegistryKey rkey = Registry.LocalMachine;

//Now let's open one of the sub keys

RegistryKey rkey1=rkey.OpenSubKey(
    "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion");

//Now using GetValue(...) we read in various values 

//from the opened key

listBox1.Items.Add("RegisteredOwner :- " + 
    rkey1.GetValue("RegisteredOwner"));			
listBox1.Items.Add("RegisteredOrganization :- " +
    rkey1.GetValue("RegisteredOrganization"));
listBox1.Items.Add("ProductName :- " + 
    rkey1.GetValue("ProductName"));
listBox1.Items.Add("CSDVersion :- " + 
    rkey1.GetValue("CSDVersion"));
listBox1.Items.Add("SystemRoot :- " + 
    rkey1.GetValue("SystemRoot"));
    
rkey1.Close();

Writing to the registry

rkey = Registry.CurrentUser;
//The second parameter tells it to open the key as writable

rkey1 = rkey.OpenSubKey("Software",true);

// Now we create our sub key [assuming you have enough 

// rights to edit this area of the registry]

RegistryKey rkey2 = rkey1.CreateSubKey("Tweety");

//Setting the various values is done using SetValue()

//I couldn't figure out how to set the value type yet :-(

rkey2.SetValue("Name","Tweety");
rkey2.SetValue("Age",24);
rkey2.Close();
rkey1.Close();

If you open regedit, you'll see that the new key has been added and the values have indeed been written correctly.

Enumeration

Okay, we've read from and written into the registry. Now let's enumerate some values.

rkey1 = rkey.OpenSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\" +  
    "Internet Account Manager\\Accounts\\00000001");
    
string[] s_arr = rkey1.GetValueNames();

foreach(String s in s_arr)
{
	listBox1.Items.Add(s + " :- " + rkey1.GetValue(s));
}

rkey1.Close();

Well, that's about it I guess. This was originally written as part of an internal tutorial. I didn't modify it too much except for taking better screenshots.

Thanks.