I have two independent projects in my Visual Studio 2008 solution. Both has its own App.config. But in one project, I need one or two properties defined in another project's App.config. Is it possible to share part of the App.config contents from other project?
Windows uses the %APPDATA% directory for user specific application configuration files.
Now you might be wondering what happens behind the scenes. Well, when you compile your application, the compiler actually copies the app. config file to the output folder, but gives it another name: When you start your application (ConsoleApp1.exe in our example), the matching config file will be loaded too.
When using Windows Forms or WPF etc, then you have the app. config which also stores ConnectionStrings. So yes they are similar but have different purposes.
Yes - of course. Any configuration section can be "externalized" - e.g.:
<appSettings configSource="AppSettings.DEV.config" /> <connectionStrings configSource="MyConnection.config" />
or
<system.net> <mailSettings> <smtp configSource="smtp.TEST.config" />
vs.
<system.net> <mailSettings> <smtp configSource="smtp.PROD.config" />
Any configuration section can be put into a separate file that can be shared between projects - but no configuration section groups, and unfortunately, it's sometimes a bit tricky to know which is which.
Also, in some cases, Visual Studio will complain (using red wavy underlines) that the "configSource" supposedly isn't valid - but it is - it's defined on the ConfigurationSection
object in the .NET config system.
UPDATE:
another feature that hardly enough developers seem to know and use is the ability in Visual Studio to add existing files from a different project as a link:
With this, you can add links to files into your local project, and they'll always be kept up to date. Great productivity booster if you need to do some file-level sharing (like for common configuration files or such)!
Try this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings file="PROD.config"> <add key="common.Currency" value="GBP" /> </appSettings> </configuration>
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