I am making an application that persists several different user settings. The way I have done it is just to serialize my collections (with the settings in them) to XML files.
As they are changed I update the saved file so that when the user runs again, the settings are saved.
As I get going with this style of persistence, I am finding that I have a lot of XML files.
Is this normal? Is it ok to litter my installed directory with configuration xmls files?
Is there a way to hide these files? Maybe a trick to save them as a resource under one file name?
This is not a really urgent issue. It does not really bug me to have the XML files there, but I thought I would ask.
I am using C# and VS 2008.
Can you not at least put them in their own folder? “/App_Data” for example? Beyond that… If you are getting a lot of files, what are the chances of being able to switch to a database? (SQLLite or something along those lines)