CFG

They're supposed to be gone: officially they died with Chicago. But some still live on, and in particular several MS apps out there still use them, and in fact they can be the right way to go in special circumstances. CFG just makes it easier to see what's going on in them is all.

CFG is an INI file editor: it scans the file of your choice, finds the so-called sections, then lists the entries and their values.



A very important lesson from the world of XP is the history of the software updates for NT 4: rather than go back in the application code to make all the support stuff use the Registry directly, the NT team simply wrote a bit of wrap code around the WriteXXX calls. This code checks the name of the INI file to be written to, and if it matches any name under a certain key in the Registry, the code maps the output to storage in the Registry instead.

The grave drawback here is that this so-called method does not distinguish location: system.ini is always system.ini, no matter where it happens to be located. This could be disastrous in an ISV application, but with CFG there are no worries. CFG will tell you when you load the file whether it is mapped by the system or not, and if it is, CFG will prevent you from editing it directly.

File size: 9KB.