Global Settings & Commands - OO Design Patterns

Question

I am currently building a WPF application and have some system wide settings. Where is the best place to store these settings? App.Config file, Database or some other sort of XML file? (need to read and write).

My other issue is the application has two states (i.e. Admin Mode, Client Mode) and depending on the state the application behaves differently i.e. (Shut Down, Restart, Lock, Unlock etc.) This seems like a good case to implement the State design pattern... but the issue I am facing is that the running application is itself the context class. I am a bit confused... should I be implementing the Singleton Pattern? How is this best implemented?

Answer 1

In general it is often easiest to store application settings using the Settings page of the Project Designer in Visual Studio. These settings can either be stored per user or per application. Either way, they can be saved easily by calling:

Properties.Settings.Default.Save();

They can be accessed similarly:

Properties.Settings.Default.FirstUserSetting = "abc";

You can find out full details by taking a look at the Managing Application Settings page on MSDN.

Regarding your second question, I would recommend using the State Design Pattern. Unfortunately, I didn't understand your problem with that, so please let me know what your issue is and I will try to address it.