Today I was thinking that it would be great if I created a utility for my projects that allowed for generic storage of configuration information.  I even started one as an example for the Web Service Security book I wrote.  I don’t know about you but storing db connection strings (including usernames & passwords) in a text file on the server just makes me nervous.  I would make the API easy to use and abstract the storage location (db, registry, xml, COM+) from the users.  If I got really ambitious I could even add cryptography and dpapi to the equation.  Then as I was cleaning out an email folder from a mailing list, and I ran across this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/emab-rm.asp) as a suggestion for handling exceptions in ASP.Net.  I then saw all the other Application Blocks and immediately installed them to find that they came complete with source.  The one that immediately interested me is the Configuration Management Application Block, but many of the other ones looked appealing as well especially the Data Access Application Block.  From first glance it looks like these Application Blocks were meant for use with ASP.Net.  I’ll give it a shot and see how useful they really are and if they can be used with Windows Forms as well.  It sure would be nice to save all winform information easily to a user specific storage area.