How do registry entries work?

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I was looking for a way to disable all caps on Visual Studio and found this post. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10859173/how-to-disable-all-caps-menu-titles-in-visual-studio-2012-rc/10859562#10859562

It says to add a DWORD registry entry to turn it off:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1

But my question is, is there something in Visual Studio that looks for a DWORD : SuppressUppercaseConversion and if they find it, they turn off all caps? Or is this some sort of hack that cause the text to no longer be all caps?

If Visual Studio is already looking for this value, why not build it into the options for Visual Studio to turn it on or off?

I've seen this on many other applications, is it just a preference of the developer not to provide these options through their application, but allow you to change them if you know the secret handshake?

guanome

Posted 2013-04-04T18:35:02.493

Reputation: 209

Question was closed 2013-04-05T15:18:55.033

If Visual Studio is already looking for this value, why not - Lazy developers is the answer, either that or some project manager that killed that feature before the GUI was complete or something... – Zoredache – 2013-04-04T18:41:32.837

I'm not an authority on the subject, so I'll just comment that you are correct. Presumably they don't automatically add the entry to the registry to keep the hive from growing too fast, and they don't add the option to the Tools|Options... to keep the interface simple. – Ron – 2013-04-04T18:43:26.400

1Its not lazy developers per say it would be simply perhaps an undocumented feature. Projects as complex as Visual Studio do not have features added to them unless they are approved. Its much more likely that the feature exists but it was decided not worth actually supporting – Ramhound – 2013-04-04T18:46:00.210

Why the downvote? Is it worded poorly, is it a bad question? – guanome – 2013-04-04T20:44:02.673

Answers

2

The registry is a database. Programs retrieve values from the database as needed. They can retrieve a single named value. They can retrieve everything in a key or so on. What the program does with the information it retrieves from the registry is completely up to the program.

Most programs Are hard coded to look for a specific entry. Some programs like Windows Explorer are a lot more flexible, in that they will look for entries that conform to certain rules.

Zoredache

Posted 2013-04-04T18:35:02.493

Reputation: 18 453

Running something like the strings utility (from systinternals) on an exe is a possible way to find registry key and value names that the program looks for. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-09-26T15:35:37.007

How do people find out the registry entries to add? Are they developers on the projects? – guanome – 2013-04-04T19:04:56.370

Documentation, Comments by the applications developers/support teams, Or reverse engineering using something like process explorer or perhaps something that decompiles the program.

– Zoredache – 2013-04-04T19:19:58.787

Alright then, I've always wondered this and didn't find an existing question on here. I think you should add that comment above to the your answer, I think it helps understand the developer's reasoning. – guanome – 2013-04-04T19:24:50.827

Asked: 2013-04-04T18:35:02.493

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Active: 2013-04-04T18:44:25.330