How to get a List collection of values from app.config in WPF?

Question

The following example fills the ItemsControl with a List of BackupDirectories which I get from code.

How can I change this

Answer 1

There's actually a very little known class in the BCL for this purpose exactly: CommaDelimitedStringCollectionConverter. It serves as a middle ground of sorts between having a ConfigurationElementCollection (as in Richard's answer) and parsing the string yourself (as in Adam's answer).

For example, you could write the following configuration section:

public class MySection : ConfigurationSection
{
    [ConfigurationProperty("MyStrings")]
    [TypeConverter(typeof(CommaDelimitedStringCollectionConverter))]
    public CommaDelimitedStringCollection MyStrings
    {
        get { return (CommaDelimitedStringCollection)base["MyStrings"]; }
    }
}

You could then have an app.config that looks like this:

Finally, your code would look like this:

var section = (MySection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("foo");
foreach (var s in section.MyStrings)
    Console.WriteLine(s); //for example