Simplifying Windows Registry Programming with the C++ WinReg Library

A convenient easy-to-use and hard-to-misuse high-level C++ library that wraps the complexity of the Windows Registry C-interface API.

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:

Complex code to get a string value from the registry, using the Windows native Registry API.
Sample code excerpt to read a string value from the Windows Registry using the native Windows C-interface API.

Note how complex and bug-prone that kind of code that directly calls the Windows RegGetValueW API is. 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 that are used in the native C-interface Windows Registry API.

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.

For example, with WinReg querying a string value from the Windows Registry is just a simple one-line of C++ code! Look at that:

Simple one-liner C++ code to get a string value from the Registry using WinReg.
You can query a string value with just one simple line of C++ code using WinReg.

With WinReg you can also enumerate all the values under a given key with simple intuitive C++ code like this:

auto values = key.EnumValues();

for (const auto & [valueName, valueType] : values)
{
    //
    // Use valueName and valueType
    //
    ...
}

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.

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