title: Accessing a user setting in C# throws exception
body: <p>I've added a simple string-based user setting in Visual Studio 2010. When my main form loads I access this setting. This makes my application crash, throwing the following exception:</p>
  
  <p>"ConfigurationErrorsException - The configuration system failed to initialize."</p>
  
  <p>Is it really that hard to make use of the user settings feature? What am I missing?</p>
  
  <p>PS: This is my app.config:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?&gt;
  &lt;configuration&gt;
      &lt;configSections&gt;
          &lt;sectionGroup name="userSettings" type="System.Configuration.UserSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" &gt;
              &lt;section name="MyApp.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser" requirePermission="false" /&gt;
          &lt;/sectionGroup&gt;
      &lt;/configSections&gt;
      &lt;userSettings&gt;
          &lt;MyApp.Properties.Settings&gt;
              &lt;setting name="WorkbenchDirectory" serializeAs="String"&gt;
                  &lt;value /&gt;
              &lt;/setting&gt;
          &lt;/MyApp.Properties.Settings&gt;
      &lt;/userSettings&gt;
  &lt;/configuration&gt;
  </code></pre>