West Wind Application Configuration for .NET

Make .NET Configuration Settings easy and type-safe

Do you need to manage your configuration settings in your application in sensible manner that goes beyond the basic features found in .NET's ConfigurationSettings class? The base functionality that .NET provides is a big improvement over no configuration features at all, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of usability. Lack of strong typing can result in nasty runtime errors and messy type conversion code you don't want to write all over your application where configuration settings are needed.

The wwAppConfiguration class provides relief and lets you create configuration settings as members of a strongly typed class. The class can then persist its content to and from a variety of storage mechanisms such as .config files, standalone XML files, strings and a SQL Server field. Because you're dealing with a class you get easy portability across applications and business layers, strong typing and Intellisense. More importantly though you get strongly typed access to your configuration data through a simple class that properly works with all simple types - type safe, one line access to configuration settings. Best of all it's not tied to a specific .NET platform (like the WinForm configuration generation) so you can use the same configuration class in any .NET app from Web to Win to Console to WCF to Service or more commonly as part of your business layer.

Here's what the class can do for you: 

• Provide strong typing for configuration settings
• Read and write your configuration settings (given permissions)
• Assign default values so you never have to worry about missing entries
• Handling errors for invalid key values
• Encryption of keys for those properties you specify
• Store configuration data in different AppSettings or separate .Config sections,
  external .CONFIG files, plain XML files or even a database record.

The class is very easy to use as well - all you do is create a class that inherits from wwAppSettings and add properties. Optionally you can add additional configuration options like Encryption or alternate configuration stores in the constructor. Forget the complexity of the Enterprise Application Configuration Block that requires configuration just to use the configuration. This class is a simple drop-in.

If this class sounds familiar, it might be because I wrote an extensive article on this subject in early 2004. However, after I published the article I ended up getting many, many requests and as a result continued improving this class considerably as it is part of our business framework we use for various products.  There have been many changes and additions to the class to make it easier to use provide enhancements and better performance and I've decided to release this version as a fully supported commercial product. Some of the enhancements since the article include:

• More consistent class interface
  Reworked the constructor interface which was somewhat funky in the article due to the fact that I added the encryption, separate section and file output options literally as I was writing the article. Now the simple methods handle the various Read and Write methods more concisely. In addition all methods that read from external stores now read through factory methods that create a new instance of the object.
• Culture Independence
  All data is now written with Invariant culture
• A number of performance improvements
• Built-in support for persisting to and from an external XML file
• Built-in support for persisting to and from different Config Sections
• Built-in support for persisting to and from separate Config files
• Built-in support to persist to and from String
• Built-in support to persist to and from a SQL Server database field

The full version also includes full documentation in HTML Help format, a Web based sample application and free support on our message board