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)
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**.