Phill,

I don't really see that as a problem in most situations.  When you add
a reference to the assembly you should also add the appropriate
settings to the app.config at that time.  In other words, you add them
at compile and not deployment time.  Furthermore, even if the
configuration infrastructure supported the *.dll.config method you'd
still have to deploy that file to every machine, but now you have more
than one file to keep track of.

Brian

I just recently needed this functionality so here's the class I made to
accomplish it:

Imports System.Collections.Specialized
Imports System.Reflection.Assembly

Public Class AssemblyConfigurationSettings
   Public Shared ReadOnly Property AppSettings() As NameValueCollection
       Get
           Dim filename As String = GetCallingAssembly.Location & ".config"
           Dim settings As New NameValueCollection
           If Not System.IO.File.Exists(filename) Then
               Return settings
           End If

           Try
               Dim reader As New System.Xml.XmlTextReader(filename)
               Dim doc As New System.Xml.XmlDocument
               doc.Load(reader)

               Dim configurationNode As System.Xml.XmlNode =
doc.SelectSingleNode("configuration")
               If configurationNode Is Nothing Then
                   Return settings
               End If

               Dim appSettingsNode As System.Xml.XmlNode =
configurationNode.SelectSingleNode("appSettings")
               If appSettingsNode Is Nothing Then
                   Return settings
               End If

               Dim nodes As System.Xml.XmlNodeList =
appSettingsNode.SelectNodes("add")
               For Each node As System.Xml.XmlNode In nodes
                   settings.Add(node.Attributes("key").Value,
node.Attributes("value").Value)
               Next
           Catch ex As System.Xml.XmlException
           End Try

           Return settings
       End Get
   End Property
End Class

  /claes