Re: Ini File vs Registry

"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:k4bbd4dn0vujgoje7qpiset4d2seuqbqk6@xxxxxxxxxx
By the way, where do you keep the configuration file on the USB device?
Certainly it
should not be in the executable directory, because then it is global to
all users. So how
DO you arrange for per-user customizations? For example, assume the key
is available to
several users who might each want their own settings, rather than being in
the posession
of a single individual. How do you manage the settings?

You could easily store config file in the executable directory, just embed
the user's login name into the filename, and presto, you have per user
configuration in the same directory.


But where would you store the data, and how would you store it? And why
is virtualization
of the Registry by a system a bad solution? Soounds like it solves the
problems I just
described, by having per-user settings.

You're kidding, right? Yeah, it's not a bad solution to invest thousands of
dollars in hacking the OS to introduce the concept of registry
virtualization just to humor a bad decision to save app settings into a
per-machine structure (the registry) that have no business being there in
the first place.


You could more constructively argue that the
Registry needs virtualized hives that can be on other devices, which is a
much more
compelling argument than saying it should not be used at all.


Virtualized hive == single file. That's the easy way.


It sounds like you are saying that because you don't like the Registry, no
one should use
the Registry, because it doesn't solve one particular problem which is
generally
unintersting to solve for nearly all products nearly all the time.

It's only uninteresting because you continue to embrace the concepts that
give "thick client" a bad name. No XCopy deployment. Hard to migrate app
settings. Maybe your clients of mass spectrometers and what not don't care
about such things, but increasingly desktop developers are fighting it out
with web apps and their no-install worries propositions. I don't know about
you, but I think web development sucks. I don't want to be a web developer,
I want to stay on the desktop. So it is to our advantage as desktop
developers to mitigate the advantages of web apps over desktop apps, which
means: XCOPY deployment and easy app setting migration, as well as a bunch
of other things designed to lower the cost of ownership and management.
Perpetuating this monolith called the registry is at odds with that and not
in our best interest as thick client developers.

-- David


.

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