Sunday, December 18, 2011

Editing IE settings in the registry via C#

We have a weird setup at work where our Internet Explorer LAN configuration settings are periodically reset by people who manage the network. This brings IE and TFS to a crawl for the programmers. It doesn't seem to happen to everyone all at once or at a designated time. It can take a few minutes to realise what is going on as there are a number of issues that show similar behaviour. For new programmers, this is especially frustrating because they're not aware of this strange policy.

To the Windows registry Batman! I haven't played with this thing in years. I never really understood it very well. "Hierarchical database? All these weird names? Huh? What's going on?!" Seems so simple now.

Editing the registry in the .NET environment is easy. See here.
Finding how to change LAN proxy configuration settings took a little longer to find. Explained here.
Proxy exceptions? See here.

With the app working, all that is left to do is set the script to run every 15mins on the programmers' computers, and we're done.

Code looks like:

var key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections"true);
 
if (key == null)
  throw new NullReferenceException("Registry SubKey not found.");
 
const string defaultConnectionSettings = "DefaultConnectionSettings";
var defaultConnectionSettingsValue = (byte[])key.GetValue(defaultConnectionSettings);
 
defaultConnectionSettingsValue[8] = 1;
key.SetValue(defaultConnectionSettings, defaultConnectionSettingsValue, RegistryValueKind.Binary);

2 comments:

  1. This was quite useful to me, registry can be accessed in a easy way from .net just need to have right key and to change the values need to have a proper right.

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  2. Thanks. I forgot to mention that you can use a diff tool to compare registry files if don't know what keys have changed. See here.

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