Configuration File Transformation with Azure Worker Roles

Question

I've just been upgrading an Azure project to Visual Studio 2010 and have been taking advantage of the new XML configuration transformation feature that is built into VS2010 web projects. It seems to work great with Azure web roles. I even managed to get the Azure project service configuration file to do a similar thing by following the instructions here.

However, I can't seem to get configuration transformation working for the lone worker role in my Azure project. I know that VS2010 only has built-in support for config transformation with web roles, but I found a good article describing how to get config transformations working with non-web projects. I've followed the instructions and it works - but only to a point. It successfully spits out the correct .config file (with appropriate transformations) into the worker role project's own bin directory, but it doesn't pick this new .config file up when it's put into the cloud package.

I suspect there's some MSBuild trickery needed to get this to work, but I don't know MSBuild very well, so am appealing to any gurus out there for help and/or samples :)

Answer 1

I have found the best way to do this is to use msbuild. I usually do this with a separate msbuild file outside my solution so I keep the local dev settings separate from the production settings. You can find out more here. I then can run the build to change the settings and upload the project to Azure. I can also run this to change the settings and then run deploy through VS if I need to debug the problem. I also have a target in the msbuild file that then can revert everything back to local. It would be nice to have these things in VS (which I have asked for from the product team). The sample project is on github.

This is also explained in the book we wrote in the Life Cycle chapter.