Since 2005 as I googled it's a problem for who needs to read the configuration of an assembly from it's config file "*.dll.config" and Microsoft didn't do anything yet.

Story: If you try to read a setting from a class library (plug-in) you fail. Instead the main application domain (EXE which is using the plug-in) config is read and because probably there's not such a config your plug-in will use default setting which is hard-coded when you create it's settings for first time. Any change to .dll.config wouldn't see by your plug-in and you wonder why it's there! If you want to replace it and start searching you may find something like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/594298/c-dll-config-file But just some ideas and one line code. A good replacement for built-in config shouldn't read from file system each time we need a config value, so we can store them in memory; Then what if user changes config file ? we need a FileSystemWatcher and we need some design like singleton ... and finally we are at the same point configuration of .NET is except our one's working. It seems MS did everything but forgot why they built the ".dll.config". Since no DLL is gonna execute by itself, they are referenced from other apps (even if used in web) and so why there's such a "*.dll.config" file ? I'm not gonna argue if it's good to have multiple config files or not. It's my design (plug-able components). Finally { After these years, is there any good practice such as a custom setting class to add in each assemly and read from it's own config file ? }