Question

I have multiple projects in a .NET C# 2008 Win Forms Solution. Some of these projects have settings that are defined in them (through the project properties, settings UI portion – not a config file). I am attempting to build a debug portion of my application (hidden away from the users) that would then display what these settings are currently set at. I have the below code that gets all of the assemblies:

AssemblyName[] assemComponents = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetReferencedAssemblies();

foreach (AssemblyName assemName in assemComponents)
{
     ListViewItem item = listComponents.Items.Add(assemName.Name);
     item.SubItems.Add(assemName.Version.ToString());                                
}

Currently this block of code just puts the list of assembly names and their version in a control. However, I would like to know if using these Assembly objects (or any others for that matter) I can retrieve the project settings that have been set.

Thank you all for your help and please let me know if I can provide additional detail.

Answer 1

When you add items to the Settings Designer, Visual Studio generates a class for reading/writing those settings to a file; it also includes a static Default property for accessing an instance of this class that holds the default values. (See Settings.Designer.cs in your project).

You can locate these classes and inspect them with reflection:

foreach ( AssemblyName assemName in assemComponents )
{
    foreach ( var type in Assembly.Load( assem ).GetTypes() )
    {
        // look for classes that derive from SettingsBase named "Settings"
        if ( type.Name == "Settings" && typeof( SettingsBase ).IsAssignableFrom( type ) )
        {
            // get the value of the static Default property
            var defaults = (SettingsBase)type.GetProperty( "Default" ).GetValue( null, null );

            // walk the property list and get the value from the Default instance
            foreach ( SettingsProperty prop in defaults.Properties )
            {
                Debug.WriteLine( string.Format( "{0}: {1}", prop.Name, defaults[ prop.Name ] ) );
            }
        }
    }
}