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My.Settings In Vb.Net

The objective of this tutorial is to provide information on how to store and retrieve application and user level settings in windows application using My.Settings feature.

Software

Visual studio (any version) should be installed on your machine.

Technical Knowledge

In order to understand this tutorial you must have the sound knowledge of following concepts

How to create windows application using visual studio with vb.net as a programming language?
What is the purpose of app.config in windows application?
What is AppData folder and what is its purpose?

My.Settings

My.Settings is a feature of vb.net which allows a programmer to store and retrieve application level and user level settings in an easy manner.

Every setting has four attributes namely Name, Type, Scope and Value.

‘Name’ attribute gives a unique ID to the setting.
‘Type’ property provides information about the type of the setting.
‘Scope’ helps in determining whether it is an application level settings and user level settings
‘Value’ helps in determining the value of the setting.

How We Can Access It

Create a vb.net windows based application.
In solution explorer click on ‘My Project’ folder as shown in figure below

Picture showing the project structure of the sample application

Click to Enlarge

A window appears with the list of tabs. Click on ‘Settings’ tab.
The grid displayed in ‘Settings’ tab is used to configure settings. Here you find all the four attributes of a setting – Name, Type, Scope and Value.

Picture showing the settings tab in the project properties

Click to Enlarge

Scope Of Settings

In the image above we have a field called ‘Scope’. This field contains 2 values

Application – Application level settings are read-only and are shared between all users of that application. These settings provide information about the URL, Web service or database connection string. These settings cannot be changed at runtime by the users as the values are associated with the application.
User – User level settings are specific for each user. These values can be changed by the users at runtime.

How Settings Are Stored

Consider the setting below

Picture showing how the settings are stored

Click to Enlarge

Visual studio stores application level settings in app.config with ‘applicationSettings’ tag. Similarly, ‘userSettings’ tag is used to store user level setting in app.config file.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><configuration><configSections><sectionGroup name="userSettings" type="System.Configuration.UserSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" ><section name="MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser" requirePermission="false" /></sectionGroup><sectionGroup name="applicationSettings" type="System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" ><section name="MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" /></sectionGroup></configSections><userSettings><MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings><setting name="User_Preference" serializeAs="String"><value>P1</value></setting></MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings></userSettings><applicationSettings><MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings><setting name="Server_Name" serializeAs="String"><value>ABCD</value></setting></MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings></applicationSettings></configuration>

Application level settings cannot be changed whereas user level settings can be changed. If you change the value of user level settings programmatically then the changed value is not reflected in app.config. App.config only stores the initial value of user level settings.

To check the changed value of user settings go to the path C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\COMPANYNAME\ APPDOMAINNAME_EID_HASH\VERSION (For example my username is gyansangrah and my company name is also gyansangrah so the path will be C:\Users\gyansangrah\AppData\Local\ gyansangrah \MySettingsDemo.vshost.exe_Url_0rqu1n2ts1alravg4t2fojyirwql1xcg\1.0.0.0. Here APPDOMAINNAME_EID_HASH will vary from machine to machine) and open the file user.config. In the user.config file you can see the changed value of user settings.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><configuration><userSettings><MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings><setting name="User_Preference" serializeAs="String"><value>HH:MM</value></setting></MySettingsDemo.My.MySettings></userSettings></configuration>

How To Get And Set The Value Of Settings

You can use following code for getting and setting the value

My.Settings.<setting_name> = value;  like 'My.Settings.User_Preference = "HH:MM"

Variable_name = My.Settings.<setting_name>;

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Sunday, July 6, 2014

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