Why are .net configuration settings compiled into assemblies?

Question

I have been trying to read up on how to do configuration properly in .net and have run into something that I find a bit odd and that is that configuration settings are compiled into assemblies through the Settings class. Removing the app.config and running the application does not result in configuration errors as I was expecting but rather now I have no way of replacing the configuration values.

In my application I have a configuration setting for a webservice url that I need to be able to pick up and set programmatically. Should I be creating custom sections in the configuration for my application that I will read through the ConfigurationManager.GetSection(..) to trigger reading of the config file or is there another way around this problem as I absolutely don't want the webservice url used to generate the ws proxy as an url that could potentially leak into production.

Please help.

Answer 1

Try adding an application configuration file to your project rather than a settings file. An application configuration file does not get compiled into the assembly.