After having my share of success with developing the “Enterprise Library Extensions”, I started thinking about how to take this further.... and conquer the complete .net configuration schema!
 

In the past months I silently developed 2 ‘proof of concepts’ applications to prove this point:

• A working demo-application that contains a big part of the WCF Schema.
• A working configuration editor for the System.Web schema (at this point without support for the System.Web/Caching and System.Web/Webservices), including support for validation, encryption and different deployment scenario’s.

From feedback on my blog (and from working on the above), I learned a great deal about what is valuable in terms of configuration management and how to build a tool that allows developers to have a similar experience managing configuration across the complete .Net framework 2.0.

This should well be possible given that the new System.Configuration namespace in .NET 2.0 makes ConfigurationSections self-describing in terms of schema and validation. 

.NET Configuration Manager

My current ambition level is developing a tool that allows a developer to manage configuration stored in an arbitrary ConfigurationSection build in .NET 2.0 (yup, that includes a ConfigurationSection developed by yourself).

To reflect this new ambition, I am rebranding this pet-project “.NET Configuration Manager”(or “CoMan” for intimae).

Kudos to the CodePlex team for setting me up with a workspace at which I will continue development and will be the place for collaboration, new releases, documentation and feedback. The workspace also contains a newsfeed aggregated from this weblog.

Feel free to take a first look at: codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=CoMan

Stay tuned for more!