Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

ASP.NET Configuration Settings (web.config)

ASP Classic provided a limited set of functionality for providing common Web application–level parameters. ASP.NET takes this farther by leaps and bounds by providing an XML-based Configuration Settings file, commonly known and represented as web.config. If you think of common properties, such as database connection properties, for example, that can be stored in a configurable yet common repository, web.config is what you should be looking at. Apart from being merely a placeholder for properties, web.config is also used to define authentication mechanisms that should be used by an application. Depending on its location, the web.config file can be used to customize the settings of a Web site (\inetpub\wwwroot), ...