Abuse of ConfiguationSettings (Ultimate config section).

This article gives a useful hint on how to implement your own configuration setting in a generic manner.

However I think that I have refined the technique.
What I always wanted was direct read only XML access to the config section.

The following gives exactly what I want:

    public class XmlNodeConfigSection : IConfigurationSectionHandler
    {
        public object Create(
             object parent,
             object configContext,
             System.Xml.XmlNode section)
        {
            return section;
        }
    }

When registered as follows in app.config:

section name=”mysection” type=”mynamespace.XmlNodeConfigSection, myassembly”

Allows the following to return an XmlNode:

(XmlNode)ConfigurationManager.GetSection(“mysection”);

This will be null if the requested section does not exist.

You are free to use XPath expressions (&c) to get at the data!