Changing a value in the machine.config

Question

What is the effect of changing a value in the machine.config file? Will this trigger the equivalent of IISReset on the machine? If not, will a running application immediately pick up new values added to this file?

Answer 1

Editing the machine.config will cause all AppDomains to recycle on the server. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as an IIS reset from an ASP.Net application's point of view. An IIS full reset does accomplish a bit more though.

Note that editing the web.config file for an application will only cause that application's AppDomain worker process to recycle, not the entire server.