Is it a bad practice to store config data in the registry?

I'm currently worki开发者_如何学运维ng on a Winforms app created by someone else. I've noticed that all the configurations are stored in the registy. This includes connection strings and so on. Is this good or bad practice? If bad, then what is the better alternative?

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A better option for you and the user is to use configuration files stored in the per-user application data directories. Look at the documentation for the System.Configuration namespace. Version 2.0 of the framework added a lot of functionality beyond the per-application config files.

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I think a better option would be to store them in an app.config. This gives better visability and frankly is easier to change.

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If you want to hide your app settings, most users aren't savvy enough to go hunting through the registry for keys relevant to an application. Also, as other answers have pointed out, back in the days before XML configuration file standards, the registry was the recommended place.

The recommended option is an XML config file nowadays; it won't add data to a file that's loaded at startup, meaning you're not contributing quite as much to the problem of a computer with a lot on it getting an inflated registry. It's more easily changeable (provided your user has admin access, and in any case, your program will need special permission to access the file to make programmatic changes).

If you kind of want to keep the data away from the casual user, a SQLite database is a relatively lightweight way to store small amounts of data, like user settings, in a manner that isn't easily changeable without access to SQLite. Just remember that if you can get in, so can others, no matter how hard that may be.

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It's mostly an old practice from pre .NET days (VB6 comes to mind), when there were no standard configuration files and Microsoft recommended storing configuration in the registry.

These days, the registry is a good place to store information that is used by several applications, but if this is not the case, you should prefer the application configuration file.