Now I have seen this question before on SO in a variant ways, but surprisingly not in this form:

I have a solution with multiple web services (projects) that need to talk to each other. After publishing each of these web services might end up on a different machine with a different database. To tell each web service where all other web services are, I want to maintain a single config file during development.

I would like to expect that after publishing the config to be present in each published project. And I would like to expect the config file to be editable after publishing, so I can swiftly migrate a certain web service and then just edit all config files of the other web services.

I don't want to do this in the database, for the config file its self should also hold connection settings to the database(s).

I came across the following ideas/thoughts/questions:

* I have a dll project called 'common' that is referenced by other projects. Let's give that one a shared.config and build a class in that project that can be used to read out the shared.config by doing `System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration("shared.config")`. Just need to make sure the shared.config will be published along with the DLL.

I would favor this solution, as it would also let me keep a web.config inside each project having just the project specific settings. And have the shared.config having the shared settings. But I read on SO that this should not be considered lightly and could have some unwanted side-effects, like file-access-issues; though I wonder if this would apply to my case. Also I would like to ask your help here on how to actually realize this as I don't think Visual Studio supports app.config for DLL projects out of the box.

* I also thought about creating a shared.config file in the Solution Items. Then linking that file inside each project. And in the Web.config of each projects, add: `<appSettings configSource="shared.config" />` pointing to the linked file in that project.

Though I cannot find any reason why not to do this, first implementation failed. It seems (at least during development), c# cannot find the linked shared.config file. I'm guessing linking files is not done instantly nor maintained after creating the linked file, but the file is only copied to the projects WHEN I do a publish. Thus leaving the file missing during development. Is this correct?