[portej05]

Agreed. The windows registry was the stupidest idea ever spawned. I also agree there should be a minimum configuration option that is tuned for high resource requirement programs like games. (I do a periodic tune-up on my gaming system that essentially does this but it is not a trivial task nor one for the techno-challenged.)

An don't even get me started about using Windows as a business class OS..........

There's an interesting interview with Tony Williams, one of the inventors of the registry, in which he talks about how the registry came about because of COM.
His first slide in one of the earlier presentations was something along the lines of "The Registry: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry...".
He also expresses amazement at how dependent the _KERNEL_ has become on the registry.
For those not familiar with COM, I suggest having a look at what it is, and that should give you a good idea of why the registry was viewed as a good solution to the problems COM throws up.
Don't be too quick to condemn it, it actually serves a useful purpose.

[Scooby_Doo]

For interop, COM stuff sure the reg's good.  For application settings? ummm I'd rather have some xml/ini file that can be backed up and more importantly totally nuked.

[gevatter Lars]

The registry is a two sided sword I think. The idea was good, to my understanding it was created to have one common spot where all the vital system information is gethered and managed.
That by itself is a good way but the problem comes with other software corps not creating proper installation/deinstallation tools and leaving mess of faulty entries behind.
Also heard that there was the problem that some corps where using the same filenames but different files and this created conflicts.

What is it about the COM, when I just type in COM in google I get hundrets of results. Could you be a bit more specific or just give a short explanation?

[Scooby_Doo]

non-.NET DLL's use COM (component object model) a lot.  It's sorta a way to do code libraries that any app can use.  

DirectX uses COM.

Basically you register a COM library to the registry then an app can ask if that library is available and request it use.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

[portej05]

Scooby has almost landed it.

DirectX is pseudo-COM - it has all the good stuff, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't use the CoCreateInstance interface, rather just supplies it's own.

COM is a rather massive beast to explain in one go, but it's got everything from interface abstraction to inter-process martialling.
It's the inter-process martialling that's the fun bit that COM can do.
The idea is that you can have a bunch of different implementations of something that one program can call. Consider the case of retrieving data from a data logger - you can have an IDataLogger interface that can define how you play with a whole bunch of data logger classes.