Free form Dynamic web.config region

With the release of .NET4 has anyone ever created a dynamic web.config element that will just let you type anything you want into the config and then you can access it all off a dynamic object?

The amount of work that goes into creating custom config sections is just over the top for seemingly开发者_运维技巧 no reason. This has lead me to wonder if someone has replaced the song and dance of easily needing to create 5+ classes to roll a new config section each and every time.

(Note, when I say free form I would obviously expect it to conform to a valid xml element)

If you just want to access the appSettings section of the configuration file, you can inherit from the DynamicObject class and override the TryGetMember method:

public class DynamicSettings : DynamicObject {
    public DynamicSettings(NameValueCollection settings) {
        items = settings;
    }

    private readonly NameValueCollection items;

    public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) {
        result = items.Get(binder.Name);
        return result != null;
    }
}

Then, assuming this is your app.config file:

<configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="FavoriteNumber" value="3" />
  </appSettings>
</configuration>

... the 'FavoriteNumber' setting could be accessed like so:

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        dynamic settings = new DynamicSettings(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings);
        Console.WriteLine("The value of 'FavoriteNumber' is: " + settings.FavoriteNumber);
    }
}

Note that attempting to access a key that is undefined results in a RuntimeBinderException being thrown. You could prevent this by changing the overridden TryGetMember to always return true, in which case undefined properties will simply return null.