Configuration & ASP.NET 2.0

My latest article covers interesting features in the .NET 2.0 configuration API.

In 2.0 you can not only read from configuration files, but you can write to configuration files, too (even on remote machines).

There are permission issues to watch for, and of course any write to a web.config file will cause a web application to restart in a new AppDomain. There is some additional flexibility with both of these issues thanks to the new configSource attribute.

The configSource attribute allows you to move a configuration section to an external file. Combining this feature with restartOnExternalChanges=”false” means you can avoid application restarts when modifying application configurations. You can also set different ACLs on the external files, perhaps giving the ASP.NET worker process write permissions on a file with appSettings, but leaving write permissions to web.config in the hand of Administrators.

It’s also easy to encrypt entire sections of a configuration file, but alas, not the <processModel> section which may contain an account password. Read all the details here.