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How do you pull values from a linked App.config in Web application when Web.config exists?

I have a mvc .NET web application written in C# and I have a web.config file associated with it for web specific configuration values. I also have a windows service application that will be running on the server in the background that has a App.config associated with it. I have linked the file within the web application and can see the file with updated values. But I am unable to use those values in my controller to display them to the UI. Is there a way to make a call to the app.config values to use in the controller and views of the web application? Right now it seems like they are coming in null due to them not being in the web.config.
Any help is apprecaited.

As long as permissions are worked out, you should be able to open the shared config file thusly:
var map = new ExeConfigurationFileMap();
//TODO: resolve this path in whatever way makes sense for your situation.
map.ExeConfigFilename = #"C:\MyConfig.config";
var config = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(map, ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
//do something with config, e.g. config.AppSettings.Settings["Blah"];
Otherwise, you can do something like put shared settings into machine.config, but it's typically wise not to mess with that file.

Reload service configuration for ServiceHost?

We have a WCF SerivceHost (self-hosted), XML-configured in App.config. The host has already been opened.
We want to change a specific configuration value in the service's binding at runtime (from code).
Unfortunately, our current approach:
((SomeBinding) _serviceHost.Description.Endpoint.Single().Binding).SomeProp = value;
does not work. The configuration is not "applied". How to force a configuration reload at runtime?

A possible approach is this:
Modify the value in the config file at runtime (cannot find instructions for doing this, but the approach here may give you a start)
Reload the config from file using:
ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("system.serviceModel/bindings");
I don't think your current approach of having the config initially set in xml and then trying to update it via code once the service host has started will work.

WCF custom ServiceHost on IIS

I'm trying to host my WCF service with a custom ServiceHost on IIS. I found a couple of articles on MSDN like this: Custom Service Host. Here, I'm supposed to add something to my services svc file, but I don't have one and I can't add one in visual studio either. Then I found this article: Configuration-Based Activation in IIS and WAS. This says
"The configuration-based activation feature removes the requirement to have a .svc file and therefore the associated overhead."
so I can just create a serviceHostingEnvironment entry in my Web.config (which I don't have either, but I guess App.config is equivalent since it contains my system.serviceModel configuration). However, I have to specify a relativeAddress for the service activation.
"The relativeAddress attribute must be set to a relative address such as <sub-directory>/service.svc or ~/<sub-directory/service.svc. "
So it should point to my svc file? I'm a bit confused, could you point me to the right direction?

I know documentation on MSDN is little confusing. Here is configuration that you need to put in web.confi/app.config
<serviceHostingEnvironment>
<serviceActivations>
<add relativeAddress="MyNonExistingServiceSVC.svc" service="MyService" factory=”MyServiceHostFactory”/>
</serviceActivations>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>
Here relative address will be just any dummy name. This name will be used to browse your service metadata. Please note that this name can be anything of your choice and it DOES NOT require same physical file to be present on disk. It just needs any name with .SVC extension.
So while accessing service metadata your URL will be
http://myserver/myservice/MyNonExistingServiceSVC.svc

Program cannot find app.config

// Set LastRun to now
config.AppSettings.Settings["LastRun"].Value = DateTime.Now.ToString();
// Save all settings
config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);
This code was working fine in my development server but not in my production server. It seems like my program is unable to communicate with my app.config file. I have checked all the "obvious" . . Any ideas ... ?

From your code example, I cannot tell how your config variable is initialized. But, from the comments, you have a web app. Unless you are attempting to load a specific app.config file, the web app will attempt to get AppSettings from web.config.
It's not a good idea to programatically change the values of web.config. Changing web.config will cause an application restart.
If you have a different app.config for storing this type of information, that would be better than trying to change web.config. But you'll have to specifically load the file, something like this:
Configuration config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("yourPath\app.config");
ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration() is intended for use within an executable application not a web app. Try using WebConfigurationManager as shown above.
You find some more information in this SO question/answers.
More information can be found in this SO question/answer.

global.asax not being updated

We have a web application where we are using global.asax for url rewriting. We use a compiled version of the site on the live server.
As a part of modification request, we had to add some custom native AJAX code where javascript would call a webservice to update the content of the page. For being able to call the webservice with extension .asmx, we modified the url rewriting code to handle asmx requests seperately.
this arrangement works fine on the local machine, but when we publish the site and deploy it on the live server, the new code doesnt seem to get included. It still skips the condition to check the ".asmx" extension, and throws a page not found exception considering the webservice name as a page name.
We have tried looking all over and googled for such things as well.. but no avail..
any pointers on what might be going wrong.. ?

Assuming your URL rewriting is good (isn't that normally implemented as a HttpModule?) I'd check to make sure that there's an ISAPI mapping in IIS on production that sends .asmx requests to ASP.NET.
If you think your changes to the global.asax haven't been rejitted then you can always stop the application pool, go find your web applications compiled bits in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework[version]\temporary asp.net files... and delete the jitted version. I've seen ASP.NET miss when it comes to Jitting changes before.
I'd also consider running http fiddler (IE) or tamper data (FireFox extension) on one of the pages that makes calls to the web service. It will tell you exactly how the page is calling the web service and you can validate that the called URL is correct.

There is machine.config file where you can add HttpModules. I also think that you can do that through web.config.

One reason I can think of is that in the Web.config, you might have configured the routing module in the system.web section but not in system.webServer (or at least forgot something in there).
I the similar problem before and the solution was to remove the module & add it again in the system.webServer section of the Web.config like this:
<system.webServer>
<modules>
<remove name="UrlRoutingModule" />
<add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule, e="RoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.RoleManagerModule"/>
</modules>
</system.webServer>
It might be a different module or handler but the idea is basically the same. It's important to "remove" the module first.