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

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.

Inside the Windows 95 Registry addresses the needs of both groups of developers by demystifying the registry, showing how the Win32 registry API can be used to get information into and out of the registry, and examining the kinds of system, application, and user information that applications can store in the registry. The book features: Coverage of the registry in both Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.x and 4.0 that allows developers to create 32-bit applications that run on both platforms. Many coding examples in both C and Visual Basic. Numerous undocumented topics, like the registry locking scheme, accessing the Window 95 registry from Win 16 and DOS programs, how the Win32 registry API is implemented in Windows 95, and bugs in the registry API when used for remote registry access under Windows 95. Documentation of a number of registry settings. This, along with the book's thorough discussion of RegEdit and its presentation of graduated techniques for backing up the registry and restoring a damaged registry, makes the book important for system administrators and 'power users' as well as developers. Thorough coverage of Remote Registry Access. The diskette accompanying Inside the Windows 95 Registry features a diverse collection of registry tools and utilities, including RegSpy95, a configurable spying utility that intercepts all calls to the registry from the Windows Virtual Machine Manager. Using RegSpy95, you can see what data Windows 95 and individual applications write to and read from the registry; you can even see what data Windows and applications look for, but fail to find, in the registry.