Question

I have a solution that includes both a web and a Windows NT service application. These are of course two different projects but within the same solution. They do however share a lot of the same configuration.

Currently I have the same values in both the web.config and the app.config file. This is starting to get messy and I’d like to have a shared configuration files for both of the applications within the solution.

• Is there a problem for the web
  application if the configuration
  isn’t at the root level of the web
  application? Are there limitations here?
• Will I loose caching and
  automatic recycling of the web
  application if I don’t use web.config
• Is it generally a bad idea to shared the configuration as described?

Answer 1

Well, you could “externalize” certain parts of the config’s into separate .config files, and use them from both places.

E.g. you could externalize your connection string settings like so:

<connectionStrings configSource="connectionStrings.config" />

and then have the “connectionString.config” file like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<connectionStrings>
  <add name="ConfigurationDatabase" 
       connectionString="server=.;Integrated Security=true;database=test"/>
  <add name="TestDatabase" 
       connectionString="server=TEST;Integrated Security=true;database=test"/>
</connectionStrings>

Basically, any ConfigurationSection has such a “configSource” setting, which allows you to specify an external file to use.

That way, you might be able to share common parts of the two config files.

Marc