Question: If I want to define a class in a common assembly, to be utilized by both a silverlight application and an asp.net web application or other type of app, can I define the data type in a standard class library or should I use a silverlight class library?

Answer: 
Your comment to cletus' (correct) answer implies that there are multiple Maven settings files involved.

Maven always uses either one or two settings files. The **global settings** defined in (`${M2_HOME}/conf/settings.xml`) is always required. The **user settings** file (defined in `${user.home}/.m2/settings.xml`) is optional. Any settings defined in the user settings take precedence over the corresponding global settings.

You can override the location of the *global and user settings* from the command line, the following example will set the global settings to *c:\global\settings.xml* and the user settings to *c:\user\settings.xml*:

```
mvn install --settings c:\user\settings.xml 
     --global-settings c:\global\settings.xml

```

Currently there is no property or means to establish what user and global settings files were used from with Maven. To access these values, you would have to modify MavenCli and/or DefaultMavenSettingsBuilder to inject the file locations into the resolved Settings object.
You can use the [maven help plugin](http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-help-plugin/) to tell you the contents of your user and global settings files.

```
mvn help:effective-settings

```

will ask maven to spit out the **combined global and user settings**.