Best practice to save application settings in a Wi

Question

What I want to achieve is very simple: I have a Windows Forms (.NET 3.5) application that uses a path for reading information. This path can be modified by the user, by using the options form I provide.

Now, I want to save the path value to a file for later use. This would be one of the many settings saved to this file. This file would sit directly in the application folder.

I understand three options are available:

• ConfigurationSettings file (appname.exe.config)
• Registry
• Custom XML file

I read that the .NET configuration file is not foreseen for saving values back to it. As for the registry, I would like to get as far away from it as possible.

Does this mean that I should use a custom XML file to save configuration settings? If so, I would like to see code example of that (C#).

I have seen other discussions on this subject, but it is still not clear to me.

Answer 1

I wanted to share a library I've built for this. It's a tiny library, but a big improvement (IMHO) over .settings files.

The library is called Jot (GitHub), here is an old The Code Project article I wrote about it.

Here's how you'd use it to keep track of a window's size and location:

public MainWindow()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    _stateTracker.Configure(this)
        .IdentifyAs("MyMainWindow")
        .AddProperties(nameof(Height), nameof(Width), nameof(Left), nameof(Top), nameof(WindowState))
        .RegisterPersistTrigger(nameof(Closed))
        .Apply();
}

The benefit compared to .settings files: There's considerably less code, and it's a lot less error-prone since you only need to mention each property once.

With a settings files you need to mention each property five times: once when you explicitly create the property and an additional four times in the code that copies the values back and forth.

Storage, serialization, etc. are completely configurable. When using inversion of control, you can hook it up so that it applies tracking automatically to all objects it resolves so that all you need to do to make a property persistent is slap a [Trackable] attribute on it.

I'm writing all this, because I think the library is top notch, and I'd like to popularize it:)