If you mentioned the registry to the majority of uses, you can be assured that most of them would not know what you was talking about and for those you did, you would find that they was terrified what would happen if they touched it. This is what most intermediate users understand, but as a developer you need to be an advanced user of the computer system that you are using. This is true for several reasons:

1. As a developer you need to understand how Windows works in able to develop your own applications
2. Use of the Windows API, which is thought to be the backbone of the Windows Operating system often, requires you understand how Windows works.

Luckily though as a Visual Basic developer, most of this you really do not need to understand to be a developer, but there some exceptions, one of which is the Windows Registry.

This article, will be split up into easy manageable pieces, which you tackle one buy one. As I mentioned at the start of this article. Before you can implement the use of the Windows Registry into your application you need to understand, what the registry is and how it works. The sections will be split up into the following.

From the very beginning to reassert your knowledge.

How information is stored in the registry and how the registry works.

How does Visual Basic stand with the functionality of the registry?

How do you go about extending Visual Basic built in functions for the registry?

First steps with the Windows API and the Windows Registry.

How to use the API to add, retrieve, modify and delete information from the registry.

Learn how to store information in the registry, no matter what the data type

You have learned how to store data, and now you will want to know how to remove it.

Here comes the warning, make sure you take care when reading this section as it can have disastrous effects on your computer if misused.

Now on to the more advanced topics of the registry, starting with how to enumerate keys in the windows registry.

For the second of the advanced topics, learn how to enumerate vales from the Windows Registry.

All of the information in this article brought to you in a reusable class, which is structured to allow powerful management of accessing the Windows Registry.

Availible Only with the MW Code Library

As well as an updated structured class, there will be articles and functions for the following topics:

• Retrieving information on information in the Windows Registry

Learn how to retrieve information from the registry, like how many values there are in a SubKey and what is the largest vales in a sub-key of the registry.

• Backing up and Restoring the Registry

You may have found in the past that you registry may become corrupt from time to time, well this section of this article will teach you how to backup and restore mass data from the Windows Registry.

• Extra functions available to Windows NT users