Summary

In this hour, you learned how to use the Registry to store and retrieve user settings. You learned about the structure of the Registry and how to use hives, keys, and values. The Registry is a powerful tool, and you should use it when applicable. Remember that the Registry isn't your personal repository; respect the Registry! Windows relies on certain data in the Registry, and if you mess up the Registry, you can actually prevent a computer from booting to Windows. As you were able to see first hand with the Picture Viewer project, saving data to and retrieving data from the Registry is relatively easy, but how you handle the data is the real trick.

Next, you learned about the power (and limitations) of working with text files. You can read and write text files, but you can't do both to a single text file at the same time. If you need that functionality, a database is the way to go. However, you learned that it's relatively easy to store and retrieve sequential information in a text filea log file, for example. Finally, you were able to utilize what you learned to implement log functionality for the Picture Viewer project.