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I have a C# application (a VSTO office addin) running on clients' machines, and I need to make a setup project or any other EXE that can overwrite and update the user settings in the user.config files with my own values.

It seems that I can't know exactly where the user.config is- it seems to create different folders under AppData\Local\Microsoft_Corporation with different names and numbers. I can try to iterate every subfolder I find but I was hoping for something better.

I can't get the path by using ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.PerUserRoamingAndLocal) because I'm not inside the application, and I tried it inside the application and it actually returned a different, wrong path.

I can overwrite the app.config because I know where the application sits, from the registry, but overwriting it doesn't change user settings if the user settings were already saved in user.config too.

Can I force .NET to write the user.config into a predetermined location and store it in the registry, so I would have it for my setup?

Any ideas how to complete this objective? Is there some common practice for this? Thank you

Indigo121
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  • I guess I can save the app settings location to the registry inside my application when it starts or during initial installation, but again, surely there is some common practice for this. – Indigo121 Jan 27 '23 at 11:03

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Don't update the settings from your installer. The installer can save new options locally (HKLM, local folder, etc.) visible to every local user. When your addin is loaded, it can grab the new settings from that location and update its local settings as necessary.

Dmitry Streblechenko
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