I am using the app.config file that is created with a console application and I can read the val1 of the key1 using the ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[\"key1\"].ToS
AFAIK you can implement a custom section outside of the appsettings. For example, frameworks like Autofac and SpecFlow use these kind of sessions to support their own configuration schema. You can take a look on this MSDN article to understand how to do that. Hope that helps.