Where do I store a connection string so it is accessible by visual studio at design time?

Question

I have some custom property editors that need to pull application data. These are working great in my test project where I am able to set a connection string in my app.config file. However, in actual practice, these editors will be running from within Visual Studio. Not inside one of my applications. Where can I store my connection string so that it is itself data (so I can have different values in different environments), and accessible to my custom editors within visual studio at design time?

I was thinking I might be able to leverage the server explorer. But I'm not really sure how to create a 'global context' with the server explorer, and then have all my controls have access to it while being designed.

Answer 1

I haven't completed this yet, but I think the answer is to create a visual studio extension, set these values there, and then just have my controls expect that extension to be present at design time. This will be a very small, controlled environment, so that should work fine.