Finding Installed Applications with VC++

Finding applications installed on a machine (the ones that you see in Control Panel Add/Remove programs) could be a little bit tricky, because there isn’t a bulletproof API or method. Each of the available methods has its own weak points. WMI is slow and can actually be disabled on a machine. MSI API only shows … Read more

COM and Registry

If you are working with COM there are several registry entries that are important and that you need to understand. I will try in this post to clarify them. But before that, let’s enumerate the three possible COM server scenarios. (As a side note, a COM server is a DLL or EXE can contains one … Read more

Working with the Registry in VC++

Working correctly with the Windows Registry might prove a little difficult, especially for beginners. One thing one should care about for example is using the correct access rights (not just the default ones) when creating a registry key. To ease the burden of directly using the Win32 registry API, I decided to wrap them inside … Read more