Visual Basic® Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library

Using Application Configuration Files

Application configuration files are XML-formatted documents that sit in the root of an application's directory; they have the capability to affect the behavior of each particular application. They are of interest from a deployment perspective because they allow you to change certain operations related to assemblies.

Note

An application configuration file is called app.config and sits in the root of the application directory. There is actually a Visual Studio .NET template that you can add to your project, to allow you to easily create one of these configuration files. Just select the Project menu inside the IDE and then select Add New Item. When the dialog box of possible items appears, scroll down until ...