Question

I need to deploy a Windows Forms application using ClickOnce deployment. (VS2008, .NET 3.5)
And I need to provide a configuration file for this app that any user can modify.
For this reason, I am using Application Settings instead of standard appSetttings in app.config so I can separate the the user config from app config.

see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228995(VS.80).aspx

Creating a Settings.settings file using VS generated a class with hard-coded default values like this:

[global::System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("blahblah")]
public string MyProperty
...

I want to read the default values from the app.config!

So I created my own class deriving from ApplicationSettingsBase but I cannot get this to read values from the app.config.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I implemented ApplicationSettingsBase as follows:

    public class UserSettings : ApplicationSettingsBase
        {
            private static UserSettings defaultInstance = ((UserSettings)(ApplicationSettingsBase.Synchronized(new UserSettings())));

            public static UserSettings Default
            {
                get
                {
                    return defaultInstance;
                }
            }

            [UserScopedSetting()]
            public string MyProperty
            {
                get { return (string)this["MyProperty"]; }
                set { this["MyProperty"] = (string)value; }
            }
            //add more properties
}

And added correct xml in app.config…

see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8eyb2ct1(VS.80).aspx

and it works. HTH!

A word of warning!! The ApplicationSettingsBase appears to use some lazy-loading in the implementation. The ApplicationSettingsBase.Properties and ApplicationSettingsBase.PropertyValues collections remain empty until at least one property is accessed.

UserSettings settings = new UserSettings();
string temp = settings.MyProperty;//without this line, settings.PropertyValues is empty!! 
SettingsPropertyValueCollection properties = settings.PropertyValues;