title: web.config ignores Settings.Default.<Property> and always uses default value
body: <p>In an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application I have the problem that settings from the <code>web.config</code> file are completely ignored and the default values are applied. The relevant parts of the file are as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>...
  &lt;configuration&gt;
      &lt;configSections&gt;
          &lt;section name="MyProject.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=..." requirePermission="false" /&gt;
  ...
  &lt;applicationSettings&gt;
      &lt;MyProject.Properties.Settings&gt;
          &lt;setting name="MySetting" serializeAs="String"&gt;
              &lt;value&gt;MyValue&lt;/setting&gt;
          &lt;/setting&gt;
      ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I made sure that the project name is correct and I also verified that the webserver user has access to the file (using <code>ProcessMonitor</code> to monitor the access).</p>
  
  <p>I also checked <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/192641/settings-default-property-always-returns-default-value-instead-of-value-in-per">this post</a>, but didn't get any further. Are there any other constellations where the <code>web.config</code> settings might be ignored? I never had any problems with the approach shown above (i.e. reference one or more config sections), but today we spent a couple of hours trying to solve this problem and we can't see where we are wrong here.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update 1</strong></p>
  
  <p>Following @jbl's comment I tried to access the settings as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>((ClientSettingsSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection( "applicationSettings/MyProject.Properties.Settings" )).Settings.Get("MySetting")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, in a local test this (also) worked as expected, but on the server - again - the default values were used and the ones under applicationSettings in the web.config were ignored.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update 2</strong></p>
  
  <p>Deleting the web application from IIS and creating a new one also didn't work.</p>