Sharing settings between applications

Question

I have multiple .NET assemblies that all need to share common user settings, such as preferences, user names, etc. One is a WPF application, another is a console application, an

Answer 1

You can implement your custom settings class, inheriting ApplicationSettingsBase. As a good start, you can add the default User Settings file to a sample project (Right click on the project -> Properties -> Settings -> This project does not contain a default settings file. Click here to create one.). Add a user-scoped setting and investigate the structure of the designer-generated Settings.Designer.cs file:

namespace ConsoleApplication1.Properties {


    [global::System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilerGeneratedAttribute()]
    [global::System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editors.SettingsDesigner.SettingsSingleFileGenerator", "11.0.0.0")]
    internal sealed partial class Settings : global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase {

        private static Settings defaultInstance = ((Settings)(global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase.Synchronized(new Settings())));

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

        [global::System.Configuration.UserScopedSettingAttribute()]
        [global::System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()]
        [global::System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("John Doe")]
        public string Name {
            get {
                return ((string)(this["Name"]));
            }
            set {
                this["Name"] = value;
            }
        }
    }
}

In your custom implementation, you will not be limited to the designer-generated access modifiers, so you can implement the Settings class as internal with internal setters, visible only to the needed assemblies, or whatever fits your needs.

Of course, you can always implement your custom serialize/deserialize mechanism, but you will lose the funcionality provided by ApplicationSettingsBase's Updgrade, Reload, and Reset methods. If you don't need any of these, this could be the cleaner approach.