Sharing settings between applications

Question

I have multiple .NET assemblies that all need to share common user settings, such as preferences, user names, etc. One is a WPF application, another is a console application, and the third is an Office Add-in. All of these settings are user-scope.

Only the WPF application needs to be able to change settings. The rest just read them.

Ideally, I'd like to use the .NET configuration framework. I'm not sure how to do this though. If I add Settings to the WPF application, how can the other applications find the user.config file?

Is it just easier to create a class library and use IsolatedFileStorage and serialize my settings?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can implement your custom settings class, inheriting ApplicationSettingsBase. As a good start, you can add the default User Settings file to a sample project (Right click on the project -> Properties -> Settings -> This project does not contain a default settings file. Click here to create one.). Add a user-scoped setting and investigate the structure of the designer-generated Settings.Designer.cs file:

namespace ConsoleApplication1.Properties {


    [global::System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilerGeneratedAttribute()]
    [global::System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editors.SettingsDesigner.SettingsSingleFileGenerator", "11.0.0.0")]
    internal sealed partial class Settings : global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase {

        private static Settings defaultInstance = ((Settings)(global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase.Synchronized(new Settings())));

        public static Settings Default {
            get {
                return defaultInstance;
            }
        }

        [global::System.Configuration.UserScopedSettingAttribute()]
        [global::System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()]
        [global::System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("John Doe")]
        public string Name {
            get {
                return ((string)(this["Name"]));
            }
            set {
                this["Name"] = value;
            }
        }
    }
}

In your custom implementation, you will not be limited to the designer-generated access modifiers, so you can implement the Settings class as internal with internal setters, visible only to the needed assemblies, or whatever fits your needs.

Of course, you can always implement your custom serialize/deserialize mechanism, but you will lose the funcionality provided by ApplicationSettingsBase's Updgrade, Reload, and Reset methods. If you don't need any of these, this could be the cleaner approach.