Professional Visual Studio® 2008

38.3. Application Settings

Applications frequently have settings that do not fit into the default configuration schema. There are four mechanisms for storing this information.

38.3.1. Using appSettings

The first technique is to use the predefined appSettings section of the configuration file. This section can be used to store simple name-value pairs of application settings, which might be useful for storing the name of the server, as in the following example:

<configuration>
    <appSettings>
        <add key="PrimaryServer" value="http://www.softteq.com"/>
    </appSettings>
</configuration>

This value can easily be accessed within code by means of the AppSettings property of the new ConfigurationManager class (which requires a reference to the System.Configuration assembly):

Dim server As String = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("PrimaryServer")

One of the weaknesses of this approach is that the name of the setting is specified as a string, rather than as a strongly typed property. It also assumes that the value will be a string, which is often not the case.

38.3.2. Project Settings

Using the Settings tab of the project properties designer, you can define application settings of a variety of types. Figure 38-1 illustrates how the PrimaryServer setting would appear in this designer.

Figure 38.1. Figure 38-1

Adding application settings via this designer does not use the appSettings section ...