Enabling Intellisense for Custom Sections in .config Files

Question

When editing .NET config files (app.config, web.config, etc) in Visual Studio, I get Visual Studio's intellisense to guide me when choosing my application's settings. If I add a custom configuration section, how can I enable intellisense for my custom settings? I'm sure there must be an easy answer to this, but a cursory Google search didn't give me any help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you do not want to modify your Visual Studio files or copy anything into the Visual Studio folder, you can add the .xsd file to your project, open your .config file and select Schemas in the Properties window (click the […] icon):

Answer 2

As the other answers say, you need to provide an XML Schema document for your custom configuration section. There's no need to add the .xsd schema file to some global directory; you can reference it directly from your custom section in the App.config file:

<configuration>

  <!-- make the custom section known to .NET's configuration manager -->
  <configSections>
    <section name="customSection" type="..." />
  </configSections>

  <!-- your custom section -->
  <customSection xmlns="http://tempuri.org/customSection.xsd"
                 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                 xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="customSection.xsd">
    ...
  </customSection>

<configuration>

The xmlns attribute is merely there to set a default namespace, so that you don't need to set it on your customSection element and all of its child elements. (However, do not place the xmlns attribute on the <configuration> element!)

The customSection.xsd contains the schema that will be used by IntelliSense, for example:

<xs:schema id="customSectionSchema"
           targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/customSection.xsd"
           elementFormDefault="qualified"
           xmlns="http://tempuri.org/customSection.xsd"
           xmlns:mstns="http://tempuri.org/customSection.xsd"
           xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xs:element name="customSection">
    ...
  </xs:element>
</xs:schema>

Answer 3

You need to create an XSD file for your custom settings and copy it to the schema directory of your visual Studio install. For 2005, this is: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\XML\Schemas

Here some information on this. http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/12/07/501466.aspx