Difference in creating settings manually vs using settings.settings in VS 2010

Question

Is there a difference in manually creating your (let's say db connection string) in the config file vs using the settings interface? I have heard that it's safe to use settings interface. Any reasons why?

Answer 1

In essence it is basically the same thing. Settings.settings is just an additional config file spec with a UI interface to be able to edit your values. Unless you use Windows Authentication for SQL Server or encrypt your configuration entries , you expose a security risk. With SQL Server, personally I would choose Windows Auth.