SimpleConfig

SimpleConfig makes custom configuration in .NET much easier. Instead of wiring up and loading custom sections via the heavy and complicated API under the System.Configuration namespace, SimpleConfig allows you to load the section directly into a POCO graph via xml deserialization.

Install

SimpleConfig can be found on nuget:

PM> Install-Package SimpleConfig

Usage

First create your configuration types:

public class MyApplication
{
    public Build Build { get; set; }
}

public enum Target { Dev, CI }

public class Build
{
    public string Version { get; set; }
    public DateTime Date { get; set; }
    public Target DeployTarget { get; set; }
}

Next you need to register the SimpleConfig section handler in your web/app.config and create your configuration section as shown below. The default convention for the section name is the camel cased name of the root configuration type (Although you can override this as we'll see later). The section name under configSections must match the section element name. All other element and attribute names in the configuration section are case insensitive but must otherwise match the property names of your configuration types (You can override this as well).

<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="myApplication" type="SimpleConfig.Section, SimpleConfig"/>
  </configSections>
  <myApplication>
    <build version="0.0.0.0" date="10/25/1985" deployTarget="Dev"/>
  </myApplication>
</configuration>

Now you can load the section either by calling the convenience static method or newing up a new instance:

var config = Configuration.Load<MyApplication>();
// or
var config = new Configuration().LoadSection<MyApplication>();

config.Build.Date.ShouldEqual(DateTime.Parse("10/25/1985"));
config.Build.DeployTarget.ShouldEqual(Target.Dev);
config.Build.Version.ShouldEqual("0.0.0.0");

If you want to override the default section name convention, you have two options. First, you can pass a section name into the Load() or LoadSection() methods like so:

var config = Configuration.Load<MyApplication>("myapp");

<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="myapp" .../>
  </configSections>
  <myapp>
    ...
  </myapp>
</configuration>

The second option is by applying the XmlTypeAttribute to the root config type as explained next.

SimpleConfig also supports XmlTypeAttribute and XmlElementAttribute so you can also override the element and type names:

[XmlType("myApplication")]
public class Configuration
{
    public Build Build { get; set; }
    public List<Dependency> Dependencies { get; set; }
}

public class Build
{
    ...
    [XmlElement("target")]
    public Target DeployTarget { get; set; }
}

[XmlType("dependency")]
public class BuildDependency { ... }

<configuration>
  ...
  <myApplication>
    <build ... target="Dev"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>...</dependency>
        <dependency>...</dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </myApplication>
</configuration>

You can also load arbitrary config files by path as follows:

var config = new Configuration(configPath: "path/to/my.config")

var config = Configuration.Load<MyApplication>(configPath: "path/to/my.config");

SimpleConfig uses Bender for deserialization. Bender configuration can be passed in to customize deserialization. For example, you can specify custom readers to handle the deserialization of certain data types:

var config = Configuration.Load<Configuration>(options: x => 
    x.AddReader<List<string>>(y => y.ToString().Split(',').ToList()));

Check out the Bender page for more details on deserialization configuration.

Props

Thanks to @grummle for the idea. Thanks to JetBrains for providing OSS licenses!