Concatenating strings with different writing systems / orientations (RTL, LTR) and forcing the resulting one's orientation to one of them

If you are facing problems in concatenating strings with different writing systems/orientations into a single one (those that are RTL are all moved to the beginning of the string, for instance) - you can find a solution to the problem here.

Basically, you need to prepend to the strings you want to manually change the orientation the unicode character that specifies the orientation of the following piece of text. If you have RTL and LTR strings and do not want the LTR strings to be positioned at the beginning, rather in their proper positions, prepend the unicode character \u200E.

Reset Visual Studio "Look at these file types" value

private static void Main(string[] args)
{
    RegistryKey regKey = null;

    try
    {
        //HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Find
        regKey = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Find", true);

        var filters = regKey.GetValueNames().Where(v => v.StartsWith("Filter"));
        foreach (var filter in filters)
        {
            regKey.SetValue(filter, string.Empty);
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Registry clear for filter keys failed. {0}", ex.Message);
        return;
    }
}

Reading Windows Registry values in c#

An example I wrote for retrieving any windows registry value, and return its string representation (some values are stored as byte arrays, some as 4-byte or 8-byte numbers, etc)

private static bool GetRegistryKeyValue(string keyFullPathWithoutRoot, string subKey, out string valueAsStr, RegistryHive rootNode = RegistryHive.LocalMachine, RegistryView registryView = RegistryView.Registry64, bool getNumericValuesInHexaNotation = true, bool displayMessageBoxUponErrors = false)
{
    //search a registry key for a given subkey, if found return its value in a textual representation

    /*
     * Note:
     * The Wow6432 registry entry indicates that you're running a 64-bit version of Windows.
     * The OS uses this key to present a separate view of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE for 32-bit applications that run on a 64-bit version of Windows.
     */

    RegistryKey root = RegistryKey.OpenBaseKey(rootNode, registryView);
    RegistryKey registryKey = null;
    object subKeyValue = null;
    valueAsStr = null;

    try
    {
        //read key
        registryKey = root.OpenSubKey(keyFullPathWithoutRoot);

        if (registryKey != null)
        {
            //get subKey value type (binary, dword, etc)
            RegistryValueKind subKeyValueKind = registryKey.GetValueKind(subKey);
            subKeyValue = registryKey.GetValue(subKey);
            switch (subKeyValueKind)
            {
                case RegistryValueKind.Binary:
                    byte[] byteArray = (byte[])subKeyValue;
                    valueAsStr = string.Join(" ", byteArray.Select(b => b.ToString()));
                    break;

                case RegistryValueKind.DWord:
                    int dword = (int)subKeyValue;
                    valueAsStr = getNumericValuesInHexaNotation ? Convert.ToString(dword, 16).ToUpper() : dword.ToString();
                    break;

                case RegistryValueKind.QWord:
                    long qword = (long)subKeyValue;
                    valueAsStr = getNumericValuesInHexaNotation ? Convert.ToString(qword, 16).ToUpper() : qword.ToString();
                    break;

                case RegistryValueKind.String:
                    valueAsStr = (subKeyValue ?? string.Empty).ToString();
                    break;
            }
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"Failed to read {keyFullPathWithoutRoot}\\{subKey} key from registry. {ex.Message}");
        return false;
    }

    return true;
}
private static void TestRegistryReads()
{
    List<Tuple<string, string, RegistryView>> keys = new List<Tuple<string, string, RegistryView>>
    {
        new Tuple<string, string, RegistryView>(@"SOFTWARE\Khronos\OpenCL\Vendors", "IntelOpenCL32.dll", RegistryView.Registry32),
        new Tuple<string, string, RegistryView>(@"HARDWARE\ACPI\FACS", "00000000", RegistryView.Registry64)
    };

    foreach (var key in keys)
    {
        string value;
        if (GetRegistryKeyValue(key.Item1, key.Item2, out value, RegistryHive.LocalMachine, key.Item3, displayMessageBoxUponErrors: true))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("---------------------");
            Console.WriteLine($"Key: [{key.Item1}]  SubKey: [{key.Item2}], SubKeyValue: [{value}], Architecture: [{key.Item3.ToString()}]");
        }
    }
}