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Simplifying Windows Registry Programming with the C++ WinReg Library

The native Windows Registry API is a C-interface API, that is low-level and kind of hard and cumbersome to use.

For example, suppose that you simply want to read a string value under a given key. You would end up writing code like this:

Sample code excerpt to read a string value from the Windows Registry using the native Windows API.
Sample code excerpt to read a string value from the Windows Registry using the native Windows API.

And this is just the part to query the destination string length. Then, you need to allocate a string object with proper size (and pay attention to proper size-in-bytes-to-size-in-wchar_ts conversion!), and after that you can finally read the actual string value into the local string object.

That’s definitely a lot of bug-prone C++ code, and this is just to query a string value!

Moreover, in modern C++ code you should prefer using nice higher-level resource manager classes with automatic resource cleanup, instead of raw HKEY handles.

Fortunately, it’s possible to hide that kind of complex and bug-prone code in a nice C++ library, that offers a much more programmer-friendly interface. This is basically what my C++ WinReg library does.

You can query a string value with just one simple line of C++ code using WinReg.
You can query a string value with just one simple line of C++ code using WinReg.

WinReg is an open-source C++ library, available on GitHub. For the sake of convenience, I packaged and distribute it as a header-only library, which is also available via the vcpkg package manager.

If you need to access the Windows Registry from your C++ code, you may want to give C++ WinReg a try.