Read a Registry Key

Reading the registry is pretty straightforward. The Microsoft.Win32 namespace has a Registry static class. To read a key from the HKLM node, the code is:

RegistryKey registryKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("Software\\NodeName")

If the node is HKCU, you can replace LocalMachine with CurrentUser.

Once you have the RegistryKey object, use GetValue to get the value from the registry. Continuing Using the example above, getting the pathName registry value would be:

string pathName = (string) registryKey.GetValue("pathName");

And don’t forget to close the RegistryKey object when you are done with it (or put the statement to get the value into a Using block).

Updates

I see a couple of things. First, I would change pathName to be a static property defined as:

Private static string PathName
{ 
    get
    {
         using (RegistryKey registryKey = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\Copium"))
         {
              return (string)registryKey.GetValue("BinDir");
         }
    }
}

The two issues were:

1. The RegistryKey reference will keep the registry open. Using that as a static variable in the class will cause issues on the computer.
2. Registry path’s use forward slashes, not back slashes.