A customer wanted to know how to get the path to the default user's profile.
On older versions of Windows, the default location of the default user's
profile was
C:\.
Then it moved to
C:\.
Now it's in
C:\.
And the location may have been
customized,
so in principle it could be anywhere.
The function to get the default user profile's directory is
is the deviously-named
GetDefaultUserProfileDirectory.
But the reason I'm writing this article is not to call your
attention to the
GetDefaultUserProfileDirectory
function,
but rather to something in the function documentation.
The
documentation for the
GetDefaultUserProfileDirectory
function
includes the strings
C:\
and
C:\,
so all somebody had to do was type either of those paths
into a search engine scoped to MSDN, and it would have found
the function to use.
This sort of counts as a counterexample to the suggestion that
in order to help people find the correct function to use
(instead of whacking an undocumented registry key),
MSDN should include the path to the registry key
so that a search for the undocumented registry key will kick
up a page that says,
"Do not use this registry key.
Call this other function instead."
That experiment was attempted (inadvertently) with the
GetDefaultUserProfileDirectory
function,
and it didn't work.