Question

We have a Visual Studio 2010 solution that contains several C# projects in accordance with Jeffery Palermo’s Onion Architecture pattern (http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/). We have a UI project that is an ASP.Net MVC project, and we have a C# Class Library project called Infrastructure that is referenced by the UI project. In our Infrastructure project we have added an app.config file to contain settings that are specific to the Infrastructure project. At runtime, the app.config file doesn’t appear to be available to the Infrastructure project, only the web.config file contained in the UI project. We don’t want to put settings that pertain to the Infrastructure project into the web.config file in the UI project, the UI has no need for those settings. How can we make the Infrastructure’s app.config file available at runtime? We were thinking maybe we should put a Post Build Copy to copy the app.config out to the UI directory when the application is built – is that the right way to do this, or is there a better way?

Answer 1

Even if you post-build-copy the app.config it will not solve your problem. The application is still a web app, so the config system will use the web.config file. The settings will need to go in there one way or another. One way to still keep those settings a bit separate is to put them into a custom config section, and then put the settings for this section into a separate file. It will still need to be referenced from the web.config though (using a configSource attribute).