Reading keyvalue pairs into dictionary from app.config configSection

using ConfigurationManager class you can get whole section from app.config file as Hashtable which you can convert to Dictionary if you want to:

var section = (ConfigurationManager.GetSection("DeviceSettings/MajorCommands") as System.Collections.Hashtable)                 .Cast<System.Collections.DictionaryEntry>()                 .ToDictionary(n=>n.Key.ToString(), n=>n.Value.ToString());

you'll need to add reference to System.Configuration assembly

You are almost there - you just have nested your MajorCommands a level too deep. Just change it to this:

<configuration>  <configSections>    <section      name="MajorCommands"      type="System.Configuration.DictionarySectionHandler" />  </configSections>  <startup>    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" />  </startup>  <MajorCommands>    <add key="Standby" value="STBY"/>    <add key="Operate" value="OPER"/>    <add key="Remote" value="REMOTE"/>    <add key="Local" value="LOCAL"/>    <add key="Reset" value="*RST" />      </MajorCommands></configuration>

And then the following will work for you:

var section = (Hashtable)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("MajorCommands");Console.WriteLine(section["Reset"]);

Note that this is a Hashtable (not type safe) as opposed to a Dictionary. If you want it to be Dictionary<string,string> you can convert it like so:

Dictionary<string,string> dictionary = section.Cast<DictionaryEntry>().ToDictionary(d => (string)d.Key, d => (string)d.Value);

I would probably treat the config file as an xml file.

Dictionary<string, string> myDictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();document.Load("app.config");XmlNodeList majorCommands = document.SelectNodes("/configuration/DeviceSettings/MajorCommands/add");foreach (XmlNode node in majorCommands){    myDictionary.Add(node.Attributes["key"].Value, node.Attributes["value"].Value)}

If document.Load doen't work, try converting your config file to xml file.