are all parts of the web.config required once compiled

Question

Hi,
hopefully this doesn't sound ridiculous, but are some parts of the web.config not required once the web application (or website) has been pre-compiled (published)? I'm thinking of things like user control declarations...or others?

thanks heaps!

Answer 1

(Pretty much) everything in the web.config is read by your application when it starts up, so it's all required to be present. User control and tag declarations, assembly references, etc. are definitely all necessary.

Answer 2

If you're wanting to keep the main web.config small, you could separating some of the sections into separate files?

eg: For UserControls we use:

...
<pages configSource="App_Data\Configuration\pages.xml"/>
...