C# settings are a wonderful thing; they provide an easy and powerful way to customize compiled applications by changing data stored in external files.

They work great when they are part of the startup project but – there’s always a but that ends up in a post – when you use them on a referenced project they always take their default value.

After three days of poring over blogs, framework documentation and other resources I concluded that no solution or work-around was readily available, even though the problem seems to be well known.

I tried several approaches, this post will describe the one I consider the best. You can skip the discussion and download the code directly here or keep on reading to find out how it’s done.