Registry and WMI – risks and how to avoid them

Nothing comes for free. That also applies to OS services: there is a price to pay. The complexity of the code isn’t too high; I am sure you could follow along. No, the price you have to pay lies elsewhere: mistakes can be hard to spot and even harder to fix. The risks are pretty high: an error could lead to unpredictable behavior of the machine. You could bring down a complete server if you do things wrong.

Of course, we are all brilliant developers. We do not make mistakes, right? However, just in case we have a moment of weakness (we all know that 14 hours of developing software in one sitting is not the best idea), I want to tell you about the risks and how to avoid them as much as possible.

But before I do that, we have a whole chapter (Chapter 11, to be exact) about debugging. That’s where we will dive into the nitty gritty details of that topic. But here, I want to focus on what might go wrong when working...