Why aren't .NET “application settings” stored in the registry?

Question

Some time back in the nineties, Microsoft introduced the Windows Registry. Applications could store settings in different hives. There were hives for application-wide and us

Answer 1

One big advantage of moving to config files over the registry is to allow side-by-side installs of the same program. With the registry, central configuration info would overlap for these duplicate installs, but using config files, the information is kept private to each specific install. It's true that user-specific configuration overrides might potentially overlap (since they're stored in the user's app data folder, not specific to the install path), but imagine a scenario where different users use different installs, in which case this potential problem becomes irrelevant.