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I think that, in reality, registry editing is no less dangerous than running 'sudo' commands in Linux. Sure, the registry is complex, and the Microsoft overengineered solutions to simple problems tend to muddy the waters some-what, but really, editing the registry is pretty trivial.
The point isn't that editing the registry is complex, the point is that it is a single point of failure for the whole OS!
I have a colleague of mine who was had to reinstall the whole OS because of a registry corruption, (the socalled 'backup' of the registry didn't work either).
So the GP is right: each time you edit the registry, there is a possibility to hose the whole OS which is an awful design..
I would a have to disagre. Everytime you use sudo you are running as if you are the admin. So it is more like clicking OK or when UAC comes up, or just using your computer in an pre-Vista Windows OS. The Registry on the other hand is a binary mess that while changing it you can hose your system.





Member since:
2006-08-26
It depends on what you do. For a while I was working on simulators and there were things that made Windows (Win32) something more of a challenge than Unix. However, I would say plugging away in .NET is no more of a headache than plugging away in Java (they're much more similar than dissimilar). What does make it suck is the registry. Especially when you have to go in there and edit the registry, or you're coding against the registry. It's always in the back of your mind that this is the one time where your 'harmless' registry edit goes foul and you have no current image of your hard disk.