To jog everyone’s memory, Java has these files with an extension of “.properties”, which are basically an ASCII text file full of key-value pairs. The framework has some really easy ways to suck that file into (essentially) a fancy hashmap.
The two big advantages (as I see it) being extreme ease of both hand-editing and reading/writing.
Does .NET have an equivalent baked in? Sure, I could do the same with an XML file, but I’d rather not have to hand type all those angle brackets, if you know what I mean. Also, a way to suck all the data into a data structure in memory in one line is nice too.
(Sidebar: I kind of can’t believe this hasn’t been asked here already, but I couldn’t find such a question.)
Edit:
To answer the question implied by some of the comments, I’m not looking for a way to specifically read java .properties files under .NET, I’m looking for the functional equivalent in the .NET universe. (And I was hoping that it wouldn’t be XML-based, having apparently forgotten that this is .NET we’re talking about.)
And, while config files are close, I need way to store some arbitrary strings, not app config information, so the focus and design of config files seemed off-base.
You can achieve a similar piece of functionality to properties files using the built in settings files (in VS, add a new “Settings file”) – but it is still XML based.
You can access the settings using the auto-generated Settings class, and even update them and save them back to the config file – all without writing any of the boilerplate code. The settings are strongly-types, and can be specified as “User” (saved to the user’s Application Data folder) or “Application” (saved to the same folder as the running exe).