Thanks Jahmic for the answer. Worked properly for me.
another useful code snippet that read the values and return a string:
public static string ReadSetting(string key)
{
System.Configuration.Configuration cfg = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection appSettings = (System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection)cfg.GetSection("appSettings");
return appSettings.Settings[key].Value;
}