Question

My current solution has 3 project with 2 app.config (one for common settings and another for service settings). As of now I’m simply creating static classes to act as a mediator to access values. I do this so I don’t have to write ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SomeKey"] everywhere. This works fine until you want to access an app.config file from a different project.

Here is what I’m currently doing (all properties omitted for brevity).

public class ServiceConfiguration
{
    public static readonly string SyncEvery = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SyncEveryMinutes"];
}

How can I access an app.config file located in another project? I thought perhaps setting VS to copy the file to the output directory would do the trick however my configuration object is still null.

Answer 1

I can’t imaging many good reasons to read another app’s configuration in the first place, it just opens a can of worms that isn’t worth dealing with.

Expose a class that exposes the project’s configured values as properties, and access them from a consuming class.

public class FirstProjectClass 
{
  public static int SyncEveryMinutes
  {
      get { return (int)ConfigurationManager.AppSetting["SyncEveryMinutes"] };
  }
}


public class SecondProjectClass
{
  public void ShowConfigedValue()
  {
      Console.Writeline("Syncing every {0} minutes", FirstProjectClass.SyncEveryMinutes);
  }
}

if you’ve got complex configuration requirements you can also look into custom configuration sections