Modify ApplicationSettings

Question

Our .NET application controls measurement instruments. The application is installed and many different windows users can access it. When something changes in the system a user has to update the settings. For this we use the standard Settings features of VS2005. This means that every single user has to manually change the settings if anything changes, since the application scoped settings are read only.

You could argue that the design of the program is wrong, but we inherited many settings like this so we actually just want to keep using the current system. How do we change the application settings at runtime? So if one user changes something, also all other users see this.

Any ideas that do not need redesigning everything?

Thanks,

Erik

Answer 1

What kind of settings are we referring to? Are they the kind of settings you could store in a database and read from when needed? It sounds like the app config is perhaps not the best place for them, given your description

Answer 2

If you still want to keep using settings, you could try writing your own custom settings provider. Chris Sells has a decent looking example, there's a good looking Codeproject article and a search for SettingsProvider here gives good looking results.