Question

I have Winforms application that must create write to certain configuration file during usage. Once i use debug mode this file can be create and written to it but once i create Setup Project and actually install the application i cannot access with following exception.

Configuration file is located the same directory as program ( at Program Files )

Code i’m using to read/write is.

public static string[] GetDefaultConfigFile(string path)
{
    string[] res = {};
    if (File.Exists(GetInternalFileName(path)))
    {
        using (StreamReader tr = new StreamReader(GetInternalFileName(path)))
        {
            res = tr.ReadToEnd().Split(';');
        }
    }
    return res;
}

public static void SaveDefaultConfigFile(string fileName, string path)
{
    using (var tw = new StreamWriter(GetInternalFileName(path)))
    {
        tw.Write(fileName);
        tw.Close();
    }
}

private static string GetInternalFileName(string path)
{
    return path + "\\setup.config";
}

Answer 1

Maybe the account used to run this code doesn’t have sufficient privileges to write to the specified folder (Program Files). If you are running under Windows 7 or Vista standard users are not authorized to write to this folder. In this case you could use the user specific folder c:\users\username to store configuration settings.

Also I would simplify:

public static string[] GetDefaultConfigFile(string path)
{
    return File.ReadAllText(path).Split(';');
}

public static void SaveDefaultConfigFile(string fileName, string path)
{
    File.WriteAllText(path, fileName);
}

private static string GetInternalFileName(string path)
{
    return Path.Combine(path, "setup.config");
}