Xcode Config is sorta a black art, any time you have a set of rules, you quickly hit a few exceptions. The main goal of using these is as follow: Edit your Project level build settings by removing as much as possible, and then set the per Configuration settings to one of the project xcode config files w/in the Project subfolder here. This will batch setup the project to build Debug/Release w/ a specific SDK. If you are building a Shared Library, Loadable Bundle (Framework) or UnitTest you will need to apply a further Xcode Config file at the target level. You do this again by clearing most of the settings on the target, and just setting the build config for that target to be the match from the Target subfolder here. To see an example of this, look at CoverStory (http://code.google.com/p/coverstory) or Vidnik (http://code.google.com/p/vidnik). The common exception...If you need to have a few targets build w/ different SDKs, then you hit the most common of the exceptions. For these, you'd need the top level config not to set some things, the simplest way to do this seems to be to remove as many of the settings from the project file, and make new wrapper xcconfig files that inclue both the project level and target level setting and set them on the targets (yes, this is like the MetroWerks days where you can quickly explode in a what seems like N^2 (or worse) number of config files. With a little luck, future versions of Xcode might have some support to make mixing SDKs easier. Remember: When using the configs at any given layer, make sure you set them for each build configuration you need (not just the active one).