When using Settings in an Assembly or .exe you can use the Settings Designer to generate a config file using Settings. The Settings Designer provides a wrapper class which allows you to provide defaults and access the config data using Properties. But what if you're not working inside that Assembly or .exe? this presents a problem. If your loading the Assembly externally and want to access that Assembly's .config file you'll probably wish to use something in the System.Configuration namespace... unfortunately it's not of much use if you've created the .config file from the Settings Designer in Visual Studio!! This is because the Designer creates Sections and ApplicationSettings and UserSettings, the System.Configuration namespace does not provide a method to access these (it has a method to access AppSettings which are a different thing. Below I've written a workaround which locates the app.config and accesses the ApplicationSettings and UserSettings using XML i...