Question

I already have a connection string in my config file

<connectionStrings>
    <add
        name="ConnectionString"
        connectionString="Data Source=*;Initial Catalog=*;User ID=*;Password=*"
        providerName=".NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server" />

Currently I am just adding another connection string in my .cs file:

SqlConnection myConnection =
    new SqlConnection("user id=*;password=*;server=localhost;");

I want to use config file string to connect to a database in the .cs file without adding another string. How can I do that?

using (SqlConnection cn =
    new SqlConnection(
        ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyDbConn"].ToString()))

This was the code I found, is there any shorter way?

Answer 1

Not really, but you could wrap it in its own little helper function:

private static string GetConnectionString(string name)
{
    return WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[name].ConnectionString;
}

using (var cn = new SqlConnection(GetConnectionString("MyDbConn"))) { ... }