Reading Configuration Files Without Using Win32

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Environment: .Net, C#

This is just a small class to handle configuration files. There are several other classes like this one, but they all use the GetPrivateProfileString()/SetPrivateProfileString() family of functions from the Win32 API.

If you check the documentation for those API, you'll notice that they are provided merely for compatability with Win16 applications. It's been quite some time since anyone wrote Win16 applications. (At least, I hope so.) You can find a C# class that uses those API here, using Interop. I don't like to use compatability functions; Microsoft is usually good with compatability, but still... and when you add Interop to the mess, I decided to do it on my own.

So I wrote a class that does it for me, without using Interop. It uses the same syntax as all INI files for Windows, and it supports sections and section-less keys.

Configuration conf =
 new Configuration(new System.IO.StreamReader("Configuration.ini"));
string UserName = conf.GetValue("User");
string HomePage = conf.GetValue("Internet_Data","Home_Page");

conf.SetValue( "User_Information", 
               "Log_In_Time",
               System.DateTime.Now.ToString());

Pretty simple, isn't it? Now, it's not XML, and it doesn't have hype all over it, but it's small, efficent, and allows data hiding. If you want to switch the back end from an INI file to xn XML file, it's just a matter of changing the Parse() & Save() methods. The code is well commented, you shouldn't have any trouble with it. If you do have problems, I'll be glad to hear about them.

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