Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Settings

WPF applications gain access to all the same application and user setting options that any other .NET application can use (e.g., the Registry, .config files, special folders, isolated storage, etc.).

Designing Settings

The preferred settings mechanism for WPF applications is the one provided by .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005: the ApplicationSettingsBase class from the System.Configuration namespace with the built-in designer. To access the settings for your application, click on the Settings tab in your project settings. This will bring up the Settings Designer shown in Figure 2-13.

Figure 2-13. The Settings Designer

Here we've defined two settings: a user setting of type System.String, called LastExcuse; and an application setting of type System.Boolean, called ExcludeAnimalExcuses with a default value of True. These two settings will be loaded automatically when I run my application, pulled from the application's configuration file (named MyApplication.exe.config) and the user settings file saved from the application's last session.

The Settings Designer manages a settings file and generates a class that allows you to program against the settings. For instance, our settings example will result in the class in Example 2-6 being generated (roughly).

Example 2-6. The Settings Designer-generated class

using namespace System.Configuration; namespace excusegen.Properties { sealed partial ...