What to do with XML Files generated by my Application

Question

I am making an application that persists several different user settings. The way I have done it is just to serialize my collections (with the settings in them) to XML files.

As they are changed I update the saved file so that when the user runs again, the settings are saved.

As I get going with this style of persistence, I am finding that I have a lot of XML files.

Is this normal? Is it ok to litter my installed directory with configuration xmls files?

Is there a way to hide these files? Maybe a trick to save them as a resource under one file name?

This is not a really urgent issue. It does not really bug me to have the XML files there, but I thought I would ask.

I am using C# and VS 2008.

Answer 1

Can you not at least put them in their own folder? "/App_Data" for example? Beyond that... If you are getting a lot of files, what are the chances of being able to switch to a database? (SQLLite or something along those lines)