The key 'SecurityKey' does not exist in the appSettings configuration section.

[Chris Beharry]

Winform / C# / SQL

I get this error when I try to run my program:
The key 'SecurityKey' does not exist in the appSettings configuration section.

More accurately the program runs and the login form appears but when I attempt to login it tries to access a "Key" in app.config page but it can't seem to find it.

This is the line that is looking for the Key:
string key = (string)settingsReader.GetValue("SecurityKey", typeof(String));

The thing is that when I build and run the program it runs fine but if I try to run it from the .exe in the \bin\Debug folder I get the above mentioned error.

I believe it's referring to one of my classes:
<appSettings>
<add key="SecurityKey" value="Key goes here" />
<add key="ClientSettingsProvider.ServiceUri" value="" />
</appSettings>

I found on this site someone that had the same error and they found the problem was that XML is case sensitive and the person had <appsettings> instead of <appSettings>
and that worked for him but I went through my application and I couldn't find any similar problem.

Am I not supposed to use the .exe in the deb \bin\Debug folder perhaps?

Any help is much appreciated.

~ Chris

[Plater]

Be sure your project is set to Debug (and not Release) and do a full build.
It is also possible that the "startup path" is the culprit, depending on how you run your exe, it might be looking for the file in the wrong place.
Is the xml file in the same directory as the exe?

[Chris Beharry]

Hi Plater, thanks for the input, it's a little embarrasing but what happened was that I hadn't created my setup projet yet and I was just using the .exe from the projects debug folder. It should have still worked but what I had done was copied the .exe to my desktop (like I said, 'a little embarrasing'). The exe contained most of the needed files but the .xml was external.

I'm a little new to this and once I did some research I found out how to build a project properly and create the proper installation files all seemed to work well.

Thanks for your input, I do appreciate the people that help in these forums.

~ Chris