Archive for March 24th, 2008

Seeking Suggestions for Reading Web.Config

RadicalWacko March 24th, 2008

I recently had a task in one of my current projects that required me to extract the authentication mode of the current solution’s web.config file. The only was I figured out how to do it was by parsing the XML of the file by hand as shown below (Yeah, I know, it’s VB.NET. I do what the client wants.):

 

            Dim config As New System.Xml.XmlDocument()
            config.Load(Server.MapPath("\Web.config"))

            Dim authMode As System.Xml.XmlNode = config.SelectSingleNode("/configuration/system.web/authentication/@mode")
            Return authMode.Value

While that works just fine, it seems a little primitive and I figured Microsoft would have introduced a library to get that kind of data. Anyone know of any?