Where Are We?

The core of the environmental settings you'll likely need is broadly provided by four classes: Application, Environment, SystemInformation, and Screen. When system information is changed, the SystemEvents class offers a variety of events that are fired for interesting system occurrences, such as updates to user preferences and display settings.

For more specific application and user settings, you can lean on the .NET settings system, which provides comprehensive support for the creation, deployment, reading from, writing to, rollback, and migration of settings. Additionally, VS05 and the Windows Forms Designer are integrated with the settings system to allow simplified design-time management, along with the production of strongly typed settings wrapper classes. Although the settings system is rich, you may need to lean on the Registry and special folders in some situations.