Deployment and the Registry

Often an integral part of deploying an application involves accessing the registry, setting existing registry values, or creating new registry keys. The deployment tools in Visual Studio .NET provide the ability to work with the registry.

The Registry Editor in Visual Studio .NET provides a hierarchical representation of the registry on a target computer, similar in appearance to the Windows Registry Editor. The standard registry roots are represented; you can add keys beneath a root to point to existing registry keys, or you can add your own keys. Values can be changed for existing keys, or added for new keys, and default keys can be specified. For more information, see Registry Settings Management in Deployment.

During installation, keys and values specified in the Registry Editor will be written to the registry of the target computer.

In addition, conditions can be placed on any registry key or value using the Condition property. This allows you to customize the registry based on conditions that exist on a target computer during installation. For example, you might want to enter a different registry value depending on the operating system version on the target computer. For more information, see Conditional Deployment.

See Also

Registry Settings Management in Deployment | Conditional Deployment