Anders Hesselbom

F# and PhotoName

2009-08-26

I have just decided to look in to F#, the new functional .NET language by Microsoft. It installs with Visual Studio 2010, and it can be installed for Visual Studio 9. I use Visual Studio 9 for my everyday work, so I installed it from here (click on the word MSI in the first paragraph under “F# Compiler versions”). After installation, a couple of new project templates are available, including a good tutorial. Thanks for that, Microsoft!

And now for something less positive. I got a comment today on PhotoName on a never-do-this-thing in my source code. I was storing values in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, something that you might want to do in an installation process, but never in an installed program. Back in the Windows 2000 days (or even XP), I thought of the Local Machine hive key as an alternative to the Current User hive key, with bigger scope. This is not good practice, and by default in Vista, Windows prevents programs from doing this. This is good, of course, and bringing this old mistake up to the surface, so that it could be fixed. I am a Vista user myself, but I actually use PhotoName on an old XP machine, so I am very thankful that this issue was brought up, so that I could update my code. If you have an older project, that you develop on a XP machine, you should make sure that you’re not using Application.CommonAppDataRegistry.SetValue but Application.UserAppDataRegistry.SetValue instead.

If you have an older version of PhotoName installed, uninstall it from the Control Panel before installing the new version.

Categories: Microsoft .NET

Tags: F#, PhotoName