Can I force Visual Studio to use only a Release build configuration for my production publish profile?

Question

I have two publish profiles defined for my project in Visual Studio 2010: one uses ftp for production and the other copies to my local file system for debugging and day to day development.

I have web.config transformations in place for debug and release build configurations. My project is a Facebook application where I set the application ID and secret depending on the deployment.

I would like to be able to enforce a rule such that it is impossible to use the production ftp publish profile with the debug build configuration. This combination would be disastrous and entirely break my production environment.

How can I enforce this rule?

I am open to alternative deployment methods, but am pretty happy with the simplicity of what I have now with the exception of the potential for overlooking the build configuration when pushing to production.

Answer 1

I don't need to use publish for anything but production. You said that you publish Debug builds to other servers, so my solution won't work for you, but it may work for others without that need.

You can effectively enforce Release build on publish by breaking the Web.Debug.config transform. Any syntax error will do, but I prefer this change to the root tag:

<configuration_ONLY_PUBLISH_IN_RELEASE_CONFIG!! xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">

When someone tries to publish in Debug, they'll get an error with that tag, pointing them to the solution.

Note that you can still build and run locally with Debug build, just not publish.