---
title: "Hell Shmell"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/10/hell-shmell.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/10/hell-shmell.html"
published: "2003-04-10T22:22:00"
updated: "2003-04-10T22:22:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Santo Replied on Config Hell : \"My take on this issue is that config files are used by .NET for .NET - they threw us developers a bone with the appsettings, but that's about it. I totally understand the .NET designer's…"
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/"
---

# Hell Shmell

By Roy Osherove April 10, 2003

**Historical article** · Originally published April 10, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

_Santo Replied on [Config Hell](http://dotnetweblogs.com/Rosherove/posts/4973.aspx):_

_"My take on this issue is that config files are used by .NET  for .NET - they threw us developers a bone with the appsettings, but that's about it.  I totally understand the .NET designer's worries about allowing programmatic write access to the config files - corrupting them could easily bring down the whole box, not to mention that the same file also holds security settings. If you want something which you have complete control over, do it yourself. It would have been nice to have gotten some basic tools for that, but hey- If BillG let me manage their development team for a day, that feature probably wouldn't have been high on my list._ "

\[[Addy Santo](http://dotnetweblogs.com/ASanto/posts/5092.aspx)\]

Hmm. Yep. I'll bite. But you have to wonder "Was it so hard to implement the appSettings tag to be used in a non-secured secondary config file? one that could be written to. This one can hold all your basic run of the mill settings. I'd hate to go back to the registry (unless I have to. Stil looking for a solution to manage multiple users easily without it) just because it's very easy to work with. I like my program keeping it's setting neat and tight - close to home and not creating garbage on the user's registry...


---

## 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/