Best way to store user pref's

[JDUK]

Whats the "best" (most widley accepted) way to store user preferences in a way they can be read and written to? I though of using .config and coding a way to write back to it .... but have since been told its bad programming practice to write to a .config. May be the registry? but im using this program as a peice of portfolio work to show potential employers and im not sure they would want a slew of candidates code writing to somthing as volotile and not-so easily cleaned as the reg' .... or is this somthing they will expect?

[Marc Clifton]

IMO, the best way is whatever suits the requirements of the application. Do you want your users editing the config file themselves? Do you want the config information human-readable? Does your install program handle creating a registry entries? Are you installing your app as an "all-users" app and relying on Windows login to differentiate users, or does your app have a separate login? Is it a client-server app, where the user config might be on the server so the user gets his/her setting regardless of what client tmachine they are using? It's more a question of requirements than the current fad. Hope that helps. Marc My website
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[IamJunk]

try using a Database. Hopefully thats the widely used approach (if not file IO) Hope this helps!!!

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[Khanh Duy]

I think you can use XML to store user's pref... The man with nothing to lose

[Lost User]

Take a look at the Configuration Application Block[^]. It's part of Microsoft's Enterprise Library. I used the Configuration Application Block in my last app. and it worked very well. Easy to implement, very flexible and a snap to set up and configure. Cheers, Drew.

[Matt Gerrans]

On the other hand, you don't want to analyse the problem to death and paralyze the whole project, so just use an ini file. The important thing is to abstract your option loading and saving, so that you can plug in the popular method of the day. Then, of course, you'll discover that the ini file format is just fine 99.9% of the time and there's no need for the overkill of registry, SQL, XML, etc. Matt Gerrans