title: Using ConfigurationManager to load config from an arbitrary location
body: <p>I'm developing a data access component that will be used in a website that contains a mix of classic ASP and ASP.NET pages, and need a good way to manage its configuration settings.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to use a custom <code>ConfigurationSection</code>, and for the ASP.NET pages this works great.  But when the component is called via COM interop from a classic ASP page, the component isn't running in the context of an ASP.NET request and therefore has no knowledge of web.config.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to tell the <code>ConfigurationManager</code> to just load the configuration from an arbitrary path (e.g. <code>..\web.config</code> if my assembly is in the <code>/bin</code> folder)?  If there is then I'm thinking my component can fall back to that if the default <code>ConfigurationManager.GetSection</code> returns <code>null</code> for my custom section.</p>
  
  <p>Any other approaches to this would be welcome!</p>