Application Settings Your Windows Forms applications will often require management of data that is critical to running the application, but which you do not want to include directly in the application's code. For example, your application may require storing database connection strings or preferences specific to the current user. The new application settings feature of Windows Forms makes it easy to create, store, and maintain custom data of this kind on the client computer, and is an improvement over the dynamic properties you may have used in the past. Now you can create new settings, read them from and write them to disk, bind them to properties on your forms, and validate settings data prior to loading and saving. A custom editor that allows you to add typed settings to one of two scopes: read/write user settings that are expected to change frequently, and read-only application settings that are expected not to change once an application is deployed, such as database connection strings. Application settings persist data as XML to different configuration (.config) files, corresponding to whether the setting is application-scoped or user-scoped. Easily manage application settings that will vary by client and user.