---
title: "AppSettings Coolness"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/22/appsettings-coolness.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/22/appsettings-coolness.html"
published: "2003-02-22T20:45:00"
updated: "2003-02-22T20:45:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Say you want to store a setting in an XML config file: <?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key=\"WebServiceUrl\" value=\"http://mypublicserver/smartclientservice.asmx?wsdl\" />…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# AppSettings Coolness

By Roy Osherove February 22, 2003

**Historical article** · Originally published February 22, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

_Say you want to store a setting in an XML config file:

__<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
**<add key="WebServiceUrl" value="http://mypublicserver/smartclientservice.asmx?wsdl" />
**</appSettings>
</configuration>_

_To access the setting from within your app use the ConfigurationSettings class:

**\_service.Url = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings\["WebServiceUrl"\].ToString();
**_\[via [StronglyTyped](http://www.stronglytyped.com/#90357538)\]

heh! That is pure coolness (as geeky as i might seem..)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/