Changing Registry Settings

I recently wanted to change a registry setting programmatically. This is really straight forward actually...

var key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(
            @"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced");
key.SetValue("Hidden", 1);

Ah ha! Not quite as easy as I thought - this resulted in an exception

System.UnauthorizedAccessException was unhandled. Message="Cannot write to the registry key."

Luckily there is an overload for OpenSubKey that takes a boolean parameter called writable. So the following code works like a charm.

var key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(
            @"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced",
            true);
key.SetValue("Hidden", 1);