Well, it depends on how you're planning on implementing it in different platforms. If you use Mono, for example, app.config
would be fine. But otherwise, I'd consider using a more neutral file format. XML is the obvious option - particularly if it doesn't need to be hand edited. Or you could use JSON, or a simple key = value
one-entry-per-line format.
Of course app.config
is XML, but it's an XML format which is specific to .NET. The format used by app.config
isn't one you'd normally come up with if you were creating your own settings file in general. I'm sure you'd be able to read an app.config
file from other platforms without too much hassle, but it wouldn't be the most natural way of going about it.
Choice of format would partly be dictated by what the settings are - is a single unstructured list good enough, or would you benefit from the tree hierarchy given by XML, for example?