Reading keyvalue pairs into dictionary from app.config configSection

Question

I currently have an app.config in an application of mine set up like so:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <sectionGroup name="DeviceSettings">
      <section name="MajorCommands" type="System.Configuration.DictionarySectionHandler"/>
    </sectionGroup>
  </configSections>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="ComPort" value="com3"/>
    <add key="Baud" value="9600"/>
    <add key="Parity" value="None"/>
    <add key="DataBits" value="8"/>
    <add key="StopBits" value="1"/>
    <add key="Ping" value="*IDN?"/>
    <add key="FailOut" value="1"/>
  </appSettings>
  <DeviceSettings>
    <MajorCommands>
      <add key="Standby" value="STBY"/>
      <add key="Operate" value="OPER"/>
      <add key="Remote" value="REMOTE"/>
      <add key="Local" value="LOCAL"/>
      <add key="Reset" value="*RST" />
    </MajorCommands>
  </DeviceSettings>
</configuration>

My current objective is to foreach or simply read all values from MajorCommands into a Dictionary<string, string> formatted as Dictionary<key, value>. I've tried several different approaches using System.Configuration but none seem to work and I haven't been able to find any details out there for my exact question. Is there any proper way to do this?

Answer 1

using ConfigurationManager class you can get whole section from app.config file as Hashtable which you can convert to Dictionary if you want to:

var section = (ConfigurationManager.GetSection("DeviceSettings/MajorCommands") as System.Collections.Hashtable)
                 .Cast<System.Collections.DictionaryEntry>()
                 .ToDictionary(n=>n.Key.ToString(), n=>n.Value.ToString());

you'll need to add reference to System.Configuration assembly