During deployment, an administrator can add configuration details to an assembly. While the assembly manifest describes the assembly at the time it was built, certain types of information cannot be supplied until the application is deployed. For example, information regarding physical deployment locations and remoting information is not known when the application is built. In addition, the administrator may want to override information kept in the manifest. For example, an administrator may want to apply specific version policies to control which version of a given assembly is loaded by the NGWS runtime.
Configuration information is supplied in xml configuration files that are either associated directly with the application, with a specific user, or with the entire machine.