Best practices for user settings/configuration in a c# client app

Question

I am working on a .NET app that will also run on iphone via monotouch and osx/linux via mono. The app will hold profiles for various users and the profile used for a particular session will be selected on startup, kind of like Skype.

To store per-user settings, I am considering using the Application Settings system that's part of .NET. However, this system seems to rely on reflection, which is not available on iphone. I am also not sure if this system will function on platforms other than Windows.

I could also use the app's sqlite database that stores the application data to store settings, and simply roll my own settings classes that would be serialized/deserialized to the sqlite database like all the other application data.

Finally I could roll my own file-based solution.

What are the tradeoffs for these approaches? Why does .NET have dedicated support for user settings? It seems like a quite simple thing that coders should do on their own, and the existence of dedicated support within the .NET framework makes me suspect that I'm missing some point of complexity.

Thanks!

Answer 1

First thought - don't use configuration settings, use the sqlite database as that is on the iPhone and the best approach to take. Remember MonoTouch just transliterates the .NET code to the Objective C equivalent code and compiled to native binary, and you may run into snags if you use Windows/Mono specific code that may not be present on the iPhone.

Avoid pinvokes like the plague if you want your code to work across all platforms.

.Net has support for user settings because Microsoft designed them that way.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.