Tim's Blog

I am working on a project that requires me to deploy files to Firefox’s plugins directory.  The biggest challenge was finding the location of this directory.  People can have multiple versions of Firefox and may change the default install location.  Since the project targets Windows machines a coworker recommended reading the registry.  The idea sounded good, but it had been a while since I had cracked C++ (let alone Visual C++).  So I took to the web for some examples.  I came across this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235431.aspx) on Microsoft’s web site.   It is a list of sample code for various Visual C++ tasks.  It helped me throw this together.  Below is source for a program that will write out every installed version of Firefox along with the location of the plugins directory.  Enjoy….


// registry_read.cpp
// compile with: /clr
using namespace System;
using namespace Microsoft::Win32;

int main( )
{

RegistryKey^ rk = nullptr;
rk = Registry::LocalMachine->OpenSubKey(“SOFTWARE”)->OpenSubKey(“Mozilla”);
array^subKeyNames = rk->GetSubKeyNames();

for ( int i = 0; i < subKeyNames->Length; i++ )
{
RegistryKey ^ tempKey = rk->OpenSubKey( subKeyNames[ i ] );
RegistryKey ^ extensionKey = tempKey->OpenSubKey( “extensions” );
if (extensionKey!=nullptr)
{
Console::WriteLine( “\nFound {0} here is the plugins dir {1}.”, tempKey->Name, extensionKey->GetValue( “Plugins” )->ToString() );
}

}

return 0;
}

Okay so I am hot on the trail of a bug in my AS3 application.  I save my application only to notice the following error message:

Unable to resolve resource bundle “styles” for locale “en_US”.

I say to myself “WTF” and just assume that my workspace is hosed.  I the rebuild my workspace only to be greeted by the same error message!

After about 4 hours of headbanging I am ready to reinstall Flexbuilder when I figure out what went wrong.  It turns out that I accidentally tried to include a class in the mx namespace in to an ActionScript project.

Here is the moral of the story.  If ever you find yourself with the above error message and you are working in a pure ActionScript project make sure your code does not have an import statement that references mx.