title: Pros and cons of AppSettings vs applicationSettings (.NET app.config / Web.config)
body: <p>When developing a .NET Windows Forms Application we have the choice between those <code>App.config</code> tags to store our configuration values. Which one is better?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;configuration&gt;
  
    &lt;!-- Choice 1 --&gt;
    &lt;appSettings&gt;
      &lt;add key="RequestTimeoutInMilliseconds" value="10000"/&gt;
    &lt;/appSettings&gt;
  
    &lt;!-- Choice 2 --&gt;
    &lt;configSections&gt;
      &lt;sectionGroup name="applicationSettings" type="System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsGroup, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c5612342342" &gt;
          &lt;section name="Project1.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c5612342342" requirePermission="false" /&gt;
      &lt;/sectionGroup&gt;
    &lt;/configSections&gt;
    &lt;applicationSettings&gt;
      &lt;Project1.Properties.Settings&gt;
        &lt;setting name="TABLEA" serializeAs="String"&gt;
          &lt;value&gt;TABLEA&lt;/value&gt;
        &lt;/setting&gt;
      &lt;/Project1.Properties.Settings&gt;
    &lt;/applicationSettings&gt;
  
  &lt;/configuration&gt;
  </code></pre>