I have an ASP.NET application that defines a custom configuration section in web.config. Recently I had a customer who wanted to deploy two instances of the application (for testing in addition to an existing production application). The configuration chosen by the customer was: foo.com - production application foo.com/Testing - test application In this case, the ASP.NET configuration engine decided to apply the settings at foo.com/web.config to foo.com/Testing/web.config. Thankfully this caused a configuration error because the section was redefined at the second level rather than giving the false impression that the two web applications were isolated. What I would like to do is to specify that my configuration section is not inherited and must be re-defined for any web application that requires it but I haven't been able to find a way to do this. My web.config ends up something like this <configuration> <configSections> <section name="MyApp" type="MyApp.ConfigurationSection"/> </configSections> <MyApp setting="value" /> <NestedSettingCollection> <Item key="SomeKey" value="SomeValue" /> <Item key="SomeOtherKey" value="SomeOtherValue" /> </NestedSettingCollection> </MyApp> </configuration>