John Dvorak is probably one of the original cranky old farts on the web, although not as good at as some people we all know and love dearly. Much of what he writes in many cases seem to be nothing more than strung together words meant to do nothing more than piss people off. Rarely it seems that it seems what he has to say makes much sense if one really thinks about what he has said.

Then every once in a while he throws a monkey wrench into the works and writes something that does make sense – a lot of sense. Such is the case with his post called What is Happening to Windows 7.

He starts the post looking at some of the negative press that has started to grow around the approaching release of Windows 7 and while that is rather interesting the real meat of his post – for me anyway – was his thoughts about the Windows Registry.

Now I have long maintained that the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to Windows is the Registry and its constant abuse by software developers. Nine times out of ten any problems you experience with Windows can at some point be attributed to the Registry having become nothing more than a bloated mess. This is the reason why when people end up doing a clean re-install of the operating system they say how amazing it is that Windows is actually faster than they remember it being.

What most people forget is that when the registry first came into being with Windows 95 (it didn’t exist in Win 3/3.11 or at least not as we know it) it was never meant to be used by third party software applications. It was originally meant to only be used by Windows but as developers discovered the hooks to storing and retrieving data from this database the pollution began.

I know there was talk with the advent of .NET and Vista of Microsoft trying to encourage developers to stop using the registry and return to using INI type files (but in the XML format) with the idea of gradually doing away with the registry. Unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet even though it should.

This was the premise of John Dvorak’s question

Why can’t Microsoft bring itself to dump the Registry?

The simple answer to this is that the stink that would be raised by developers would be deafening – even though they know that the registry is a big Achilles heel for the operating system. It doesn’t matter that there really is no need anymore for applications to latch on to the registry the way they do, as John points out

The Registry does not do anything that cannot be done without the Registry. The whole idea stems from the days when resources had to be shared and parameters needed to be centrally located so the hard disk would not be clogged with redundant code. And while there are some good reasons to have a tightly controlled Registry, it is very inconvenient in an environment where a lot of upgrading is a benefit. And note that data redundancy means nothing in the era of $89 1TB hard disks and cloud computing.

Personally I think the time has come – especially with .NET applications – that developers need to stop using or relying on the Registry. This is especially true of the big programs out there – have you ever seen the mess that programs like Photoshop or other big programs like it load into the registry? It’s scary trust me.

Moving away from using the registry is even more important these days as we move more and more to portability of data and the applications that use them. Just as there is the movement to kill Internet Explorer 6 I think we need the same thing for applications on the operating system – we need to enforce a Registry Intervention.