Fundamentals #2: The New Registry

Karsten continues his dig into the Fundamentals Pillar of Longhorn by describing the 3 main points of the new configuration settings infrastructure of Longhorn:

1. Configuration schema, which allows settings to be schematized based on XML
2. Configuration engine that has a suite of APIs for reading and writing configuration settings
3. Optimized configuration store that can be synched with legacy stores such as the registry, INI files, etc.

Karsten also points out a tool (wcmedit.exe) for browsing the configuration store and a sample (Longhorn SDK->Samples->WMI->WMI.Configuration Sample 1).

Personally, I’ve never been happy with the various configuration settings stories of any of the Windows OSes, so I’m happy to see this problem tackled again. And if this new way of handling application and user configuration settings doesn’t meet your needs, let us know!