How can I share application configuration in a .net application?

Question

I've got a relatively large .Net system that consists of a number of different applications. Rather than having lots of different app.config files, I would like to share a single configuration file between all the apps.

I would also like to have one version when developing on my machine, one version for someone else developing on their machine, one version for a test system and one version for a live system.

Is there an easy way of doing this?

Answer 1

For large amounts of configuration which is needed by multiple applications, I would put this configuration into a central repository, e.g. a database, file in a common location.

To use different versions of a configuration file for different environments, create a build configuration for each of the different environments and a config file named after the environment, e.g:

production production.app.config test test.app.config

You can then use a pre build event to copy the correct config over the default app.config in your project. This will then get copied to your output directory as normal.

The pre build event would look similar to the above, just use $(Configuration) to get the appropriate file for the environment you want.

You could combine this with the above to copy the overall build specific config files into each project.