C# .NET - method to store some very small scale persistent information?

John Humphreys - w00te picture John Humphreys - w00te · Apr 25, 2012 · Viewed 22.7k times · Source

I have an application that will need extremely little persistent storage. Realistically, we're talking about < 30 integers. All the application needs is to know those integers on next startup (and the integers do change as it runs).

A database is overkill for this, but I don't particularly want to just use a text file either.

Does C# have any mechanism for persisting small values like this between runs? I've noticed you can store things in resource files and some other places - I don't know if you can change those in the runtime though. I'm just learning C# & .NET for a new job, so apologies if this is a silly question!

Answer

Zachary picture Zachary · Apr 25, 2012

Here is a blurp of another SO post that explains how to setup Application Settings, this is a simple file based solution for reading/writing values.

"If you work with Visual Studio then it is pretty easy to get persistable settings. Right click on the project in Solution Explorer, choose Properties. Select the Settings tab, click on the hyperlink if settings doesn't exist. Use the Settings tab to create application settings. Visual Studio creates the files Settings.settings and Settings.Designer.settings that contain the singleton class Settings inherited from ApplicationSettingsBase. You can access this class from your code to read/write application settings:"

Settings.Default["SomeProperty"] = "Some Value";
Settings.Default.Save(); // Saves settings in application configuration file