Can I control the location of .NET user settings to avoid losing settings on application upgrade?

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I wanted to add this quoted text as a reference for when i have this problem in the future. Supposedly you can instruct the ApplicationSettings infrastructure to copy settings from a previous version by calling Upgrade:

Properties.Settings.Value.Upgrade();

From Client Settings FAQ blog post: (archive)

Q: Why is there a version number in the user.config path? If I deploy a new version of my application, won’t the user lose all the settings saved by the previous version?

A: There are couple of reasons why the
user.config path is version sensitive.

(1) To support side-by-side deployment
of different versions of an
application (you can do this with
Clickonce, for example). It is
possible for different version of the
application to have different settings
saved out.

(2) When you upgrade an
application, the settings class may
have been altered and may not be
compatible with what’s saved out,
which can lead to problems.

However, we have made it easy to
upgrade settings from a previous
version of the application to the
latest. Simply call
ApplicationSettingsBase.Upgrade() and
it will retrieve settings from the
previous version that match the
current version of the class and store
them out in the current version’s
user.config file. You also have the
option of overriding this behavior
either in your settings class or in
your provider implementation.

Q: Okay, but how do I know when to
call Upgrade?

A: Good question. In Clickonce, when
you install a new version of your
application, ApplicationSettingsBase
will detect it and automatically
upgrade settings for you at the point
settings are loaded. In non-Clickonce
cases, there is no automatic upgrade –
you have to call Upgrade yourself.
Here is one idea for determining when
to call Upgrade:

Have a boolean setting called
CallUpgrade and give it a default
value of true. When your app starts
up, you can do something like:

if (Properties.Settings.Value.CallUpgrade)
{
   Properties.Settings.Value.Upgrade();
   Properties.Settings.Value.CallUpgrade = false;    
}

This will ensure that Upgrade() is
called only the first time the
application runs after a new version
is deployed.

i don’t believe for a second that it could actually work – there’s no way Microsoft would provide this ability, but the method is there just the same.

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