A Programmer's Introduction to Visual Basic® .NET

Configuring .NET Applications

Once upon a time, configuration for applications was quite a pain. With desktop-based applications, you were often required to manipulate registry values or deal with external .ini files. These were both good places to store configuration information, but were lacking in flexibility.

The registry was a repository of application information, and a logical place to store your custom information. However, the registry was hardly portable, so settings on one machine were not transferable to another without a registry dump. Also, if anything occurred that caused your application to become out of sync with the registry (such as the application path changing), you were out of luck. For settings to be restored, you often ...