Making Registry changes during startup of stateless service in Service Fabric

Question

I am using a library which searches in registry for a dll. That dll can be installed by running MSI in the Service Fabric cluster and this path will be set.

But I wanted to avoid the installation of MSI in the cluster, and provided the required dlls in the package itself. During start up of the service, I am creating the registry entry and giving the location of the dll in my package. Everything is working as expected.

Is this approach ideal? Are we allowed to make changes to registry? If not, how do we solve this problem? Any pointers are appreciated.

Answer 1

If the library has to use the registry, there is nothing you can do about it other than register the values. If you could change the DLL to retrieve this information from the configuration file would be the ideal solution.

You can do it in SF, the right way to do it is using the SetupEntryPoint option of the ServiceManifest to do these management tasks, and from the Application manifest you can set the policies to specify which user you should run these policies. it is described here with more details

The main issue you have on SF with this approach is that you application might move around the cluster and you have to register it on every node, and maybe also remove it when the application is not running there anymore to avoid garbage in the registry.