Hi Friends,
ASP.NET provides a configuration system we can use to keep our applications flexible at runtime. In this article we will examine some tips and best practices for using the configuration system for the best results.
The <appSettings> element of a web.config file is a place to store connection strings, server names, file paths, and other miscellaneous settings needed by an application to perform work. The items inside appSettings are items that need to be configurable depending upon the environment, for instance, any database connection strings will change as you move your application from a testing and staging server into production.
As an example, let’s examine this minimal web.config with an appSetting entry to hold our connection string:
Some applications will duplicate these lines of code in many places. If we think about how the above code will evolve over time, we might see a handful of weaknesses. First, we have a hard coded string in place to fetch connection information from the web.config. Hard coded strings can be easy to mistype and difficult to track down if the key ever changes. Secondly, the code will tie us forever to the appSettings section of the web.config file. Although web.config is designed for just such a setting, we might find in the future that we need to pull configuration settings from a database, or change a setting from being application-wide to being a per-user configuration item kept in the Session or in a cookie.
