Comments on: How we handle application configuration

By: joshuaflanagan

joshuaflanagan — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 02:48:00 +0000

I do not work with .NET anymore, but I’m pretty sure my old teammates still use some form of this approach. The best place to ask for details on the latest approach, and possibly code, is probably the FubuMVC mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/fubumvc-devel

By: Richard Brown

Richard Brown — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:25:00 +0000

Hi Joshua,

Its been 3 years since you posted this, so plenty of time for real world testing :-) I was wondering – do you still use this solution for your new projects? Also, do you have any source code of this?

Thanks!

By: VirtualStaticVoid

VirtualStaticVoid — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:43:03 +0000

I discovered your blog today, and found it to be very informative.
You make mention of “We” in most of the posts, and the “project” we are working on.
So I was wondering who is “We” and what is the “project”.

Thanks

By: Gustavo

Gustavo — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:09:46 +0000

Hello Joshua, nice read!!!
I like your style…
Do you have this code for example?

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:06:42 +0000

How would you do user specific settings?
Stored in Session?
Static Dictionary object with user name as key?

Not quite sure where do go on this?

By: Joshua Flanagan

Joshua Flanagan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:29:52 +0000

@andyclap – There were historical reasons for the DictionaryConvertible design. Starting fresh designing just for the configuration scenario, it would probably look like you describe.

By: andyclap

andyclap — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:47:31 +0000

What was your decision process behind DictionaryConvertible?

Naively I’d see the detection and reporting of config parse errors as a responsibility of the ISettingsProvider; with a marker interface/attribute on the class to indicate it’s a settings holder.

By: Reshef Mann

Reshef Mann — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:50:56 +0000

@Dara:

The job of the configreader is to set up the the various settings type and then the configbrowser is can be passed to get the settings, however a refactoring might be an option – this is just the initial api and it can evolve :)

In order to define a different config data one can implement the IConfigurationSource interface and pass it. The default implementation is for the application configuration file.

By: Joshua Flanagan

Joshua Flanagan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:41:16 +0000

@DaRa – We considered registering them as singletons, but decided that was premature optimization. The built-in ConfigurationManager already caches the config file, so its really just the population of the classes that is repeated. The fact that the settings wont change at runtime is an implementation detail of AppSettingsProvider, and not necessarily part of the ISettingsProvider contract.
But of course, if performance becomes an issue, that is an easy fix.

By: Joshua Flanagan

Joshua Flanagan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:28:57 +0000

@PitaDevAj – no reason we aren’t using a custom section, other than we didn’t need it at the time. If we decide we prefer a custom section, its a one line change.