Mabry's RegiCon control will help you take advantage of the Windows Registry. With the introduction of Windows 95, the use of the Windows Registry is now recommended over .INI files. RegiCon is a VB5 ActiveX control that allows your application to easily access the Windows Registry.
Creating or deleting registry keys and items is as easy as setting two or three properties and invoking a single method. You can also set, retrieve or change an item's value. When retrieving a value the control returns both the value and its data type. There is even a property that will tell you if a key or item exists.
The control can be used for any number of situations where you need to store or retrieve information for your applications. Use the control to store version information or configuration settings. Read the system configurations of the computer to customize or optimize your application for the computer. Control evaluation periods of shareware products. Maintain access control or encrypted security lists.
The control can be used in any 32 bit development environment and works with the Win95 or WinNT 4.0 registry. It supports the most common registry data types, including strings, multi-line strings, Dword (long integers), free form binary, expanded strings, and others.
The Registry uses a hierarchical data structure that contains keys and items. It is configured very much like the directory and file structure of a hard disk. Think of keys as directories and items as files. Directories do not contain data. They only contain other directories (sub-directories) or the files that actually contain the data. Likewise, Registry keys can either contain other keys (sub-keys) or items. The actual data stored in the registry is not kept in keys but in the items within the keys. When a key contains a sub-key, the combination is considered a multi-key.
Keys cannot begin or end with a backslash and must be 255 characters or less.