The beginning of the end for the system Registry
In the days of the Windows 2.x environment - which was then an overlay on top of MS-DOS - applications stored information about themselves in "initialization files," which were plaintext files whose variables and values could be plainly read by anyone. In the era before the Web, this wasn't a security concern. Unofficially with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and later officially with Windows 95, Microsoft's implementation of its ground-breaking Component Object Model (COM) brought with it the creation of the System Registry - one colossal non-relational database whose three principal files became the easiest targets for the first network incursion attempts. Besides, as more and more applications are installed in Windows, the Registry has historically been the culprit for making everything slower and slower over time.
This afternoon, Microsoft's Greg Sullivan confirmed the company's official exodus away from the System Registry as a key component, and toward what are now being called "application manifests" - individual, secure files for applications to store their own configuration data, and for other purposes. It turns out that, as Microsoft moves toward gradual adoption of what was dubbed this morning Windows Communication Foundation (formerly and more affectionately known as "Indigo"), a single file for storing the configurations and data attributes of all running components in the system, may eventually no longer be necessary.
"This has been an ongoing design goal of ours," Sullivan told us. "The Registry has served its purpose well for managing the settings and keys required to do configuration - particularly application installation and behavior - but that model has also been fraught with some challenges that we've had to face. So it's been a long-term goal for us to evolve that." However, Sullivan added, there are still over 600 million people using Windows XP and, therefore, using local System Registries. The challenge over the next several years will be to migrate to a Registry-free world without breaking applications.
One approach to implementing this exodus, Sullivan revealed to us for the first time, will be a new system that provides non-administrative users with a "virtual Registry," ostensibly at first for the sake of protecting the main Registry from abuse. This way, said Sullivan, "not every user has to be an administrator to accomplish something. But when we're able to virtualize the Registry, we can actually provide a standard user with a way to have a meaningful interaction, including installing applications that write to the Registry, but in a way that doesn't necessarily permanently harm or affect what the administrator has set up." Conceivably, a virtual Registry could be used by older Windows applications that still require it, within a future system - probably far later than Vista - that no longer provides the Registry as a standard service.
