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: 
Start maven with -X option (debug) and examine the beginning of the output. There should be something like this:

```
...
[INFO] Error stacktraces are turned on.
[DEBUG] Reading global settings from c:\....\apache-maven-3.0.3\conf\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Reading user settings from c:\....\.m2\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Using local repository at C:\....\repository
...

```

(Original directory names are removed by me)
Quick and dirty method to determine if Maven is using desired settings.xml would be invalidate its xml and run some safe maven command that requires settings.xml. 

If it reads **this** settings.xml then Maven reports an error: *"Error reading settings.xml..."*