Thus far, I am using the registry to save preferences for my program. However, deep down I don't like this, and would prefer to save settings to a file in the Documents and Settings tree in Windows. The one big thing stopping me so far is the amount of bloat it looks like I would have to add to my program to save and load settings from a file. Am I missing something simple, much like what Cocoa offers? By what I can tell in OS X, as a program, you can say "I want to save setting X" with a single function call similar to SetValue on a RegistryKey. The API then take care of creating an XML file if needed, otherwise it updates the existing file created earlier in the users ~/Library directory.