Visual Studio Project Settings

-
When I first started using the settings feature that was built into Visual Studio, I thought that they were pretty straight forward. It turns out that I had virtually no idea what was really going on. This is probably has mostly to do with MSDN's lack of documentation, as usual. Now I will attempt to lay out how this monster really works.

First goto the properties page of a project and goto the settings tab. From here you can set up either Application or User settings. It turns out that the differences are pretty self explanitory. A user setting will actually end up in a user.config file burried in the Documents And Settings folder for each user. This means that each user will be able to have a different set of settings for these. Application settings are actually read from the myapp.exe.config file in the application path (usually in Program Files).

To access these settings from code, all you need to do is:

string mySetting = Properties.Settings.Default.MySetting;

If you are accessing a user setting, the program will first look in the user.config file burried in the user's Documents And Settings, then in the myApp.exe.config file, and finally in the hardcoded default values. For an application setting, the same order is used starting at the myApp.exe.config file.

To add to the excitement, it turns out that it is only possible to save user settings from your application. If you are writing to a user setting to the user.config file in the user's Documents And Settings, all you have to do is:

Properties.Settings.Default.MySetting = mySetting;
Properties.Settings.Default.Save();

If you want to save a user setting or an application setting to the myApp.config file in the application's path, there is no built in way. You will have to resort to loading the file into an XML DOM API and edit the file manually.

The main point to recognize here is that even if you uninstall an application, the user settings will stick around in the Application Data for a user, and magically reappear next time the application is installed. These files must be removed if you want to reset your user settings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form.Show() From Another THread - C#.Net

-
Today I ran into a mojor headache. I have a main form that instantiates a secondary form from its constructor. I also register to a receive data event that I have based on a socket. Because the socket uses threading, when my event delegate is called, it is being called from the context of another thread. It is inside the execution of the delegate that I ran into trouble. When I receive data from the socket, I want to open the secondary form and do something with it. Immediately I know that I am going to have to use Invoke on the secondary form in order to safely modify it from the other thread. My original attempt looked like this (I will use an inline delegate here to simplify this listing): void dataReceived() { If(secondaryForm.InvokeRequired) { MethodInvoker myDelegate = delegate { secondaryForm.Show(); //do other work on secondaryForm }; secondaryForm.Invoke(myDelegate)...
Read more

Recover deleted files from a jailbroke iPhone (or *nix)

-
Here I will describe a process that will allow you to recover deleted files from an jailbroken iPhone hard drive. If you do not know what jailbroken means, your device most likely does not fall into this category. This method should also work with virtually any *nix based distribution as well. I will split this up into two parts: create disk image and analyze disk image. You will also find a list of my resources at the end. I suggest reading completely through each section before attempting it. Do not be intimidated by the length of this post. I have tried to provide a lot of information, but this operation boils down to using only 2 commands. CREATE DISK IMAGE The instant you realize that you need to recover a deleted file, stop using the device immediately. The more you continue to use the device, the higher the chance that the files you need will be overwritten. The first thing we need to do is to make a copy of the data on the device's hard drive. The technique we ...
Read more

Triple-Boot MacBook Pro

-
I am now the proud owner of a triple-boot MacBook Pro featuring OSX, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 10.4; One big happy family! I primarily followed the article here: http://fletcherpenney.net/2009/04/create_the_ultimate_triple-boo I already had OSX with Windows XP set up on boot camp. To get the full house, I only needed to add Ubuntu to the mix. I began by shrinking the OSX partition to make room for Ubuntu using OSX's disk utility. I then installed Ubuntu onto the new partition using a single partition (no separate swap partition) being sure to install the grub boot loader to the same partition (not into the MBR). The key to getting all of the OSs to play nicely together is to use a utility called 'rEFIt' which acts as a boot loader as well as syncs the EFI and MBR for you. It is easily installed from OSX and is available here: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ At that point, all seemed well accept for a nice new BSOD when booting into Windows with the error "UNMOUNTABL...
Read more