A central requirement of any web application server is a rich and flexible configuration system û one that enables developers to easily
associate settings with an installable application (without having to ôbakeö values into code), and enables administrators to easily
customize these values post-deployment. The ASP+ configuration system has been designed to meet the needs of both of these
audiences, and provides a hierarchical configuration infrastructure that enables extensible configuration data to be defined and
used throughout an application, site, and/or machine. It has the following qualities that make it uniquely
suited to building and maintaining web applications:
<ul>
<li>ASP+ allows configuration settings to be stored together with static content, dynamic pages and business objects within a single
application directory hierarchy. A user or administrator simply needs to copy a single directory tree to setup an ASP+ application on a
machine.
<p>
<li>Configuration data is stored in plaintext files that are both human-readable as well as human-writeable. Administrators and developers
can use any standard text editor, XML parser, or scripting language to interpret and update configuration settings.
<p>
<li>ASP+ provides an extensible configuration infrastructure that enables third-party developers to store their own configuration settings,
define the persistence format of their own configuration settings, intelligently participate in the processing of them, as well as control
the resulting object model through which those settings are ultimately exposed.
<p>
<li>Changes to ASP+ configuration files are automatically detected by the system, and are applied without requiring any
user-intervention (in other words û an administrator should not need to restart the web server or reboot the machine in order for them to take effect).
</ul>
<p>
To learn more about the ASP+ configuration system and how it works, read the following two sections:
<a href="configformat.aspx">Configuration File Format</a> and <a href="configretrieve.aspx">Retrieving Configuration</a>.
