Visual studio 2010 - Per Developer/machine/environment Web.Config settings

Question

Wanted to pick the brains of those MS Build/ VS Post build exponents here.

I would like to have my web.config entries customizable per user/machine/environment.

I could have my configurable/changeable entries marked in the web.config and would like those entries overridden by the respective user/environment file and would like to have an order that decides which entries should trump the other if the entry is found in multiple files.

for eg: web.config has a $connectionstring entry and the customization files per user/environment could have the potential values to replace $connectionstring depending on the context/configuration the solution is built

which means, I could have a set of files like below:

user_joe.config

       $connectionstring = db_where_joe_like_to_connect_to 

staging.config

       $connectionstring = db_where_staging_connect_to  

production.config

       $connectionstring = db_production

so if joe is compiling the solution from his Dev box, the web.config should have the value "db_where_joe_like_to_connect_to" for $connectionstring.

I am hoping there could be a solution that doesn't involve Nant.

hope someone can throw pointers.

Answer 1

You can use visual studio 2010's web.config transform settings.

http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2009/06/16/visual-studio-2010-web-config-transforms.aspx

This will allow each developer to have their portion of a web.config that can get merged in for their build settings.

Internally we use an event that was pieced together from various places on the net- since normally this happens during publishing and we wanted it to happen at compile time.

Add a BeforeBuild target So - from the csproj file:

<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
    <TransformXml Source="$(SolutionDir)Web.config" Transform="$(SolutionDir)Web.$(Configuration).config" Destination="$(SolutionDir)Web.$(Configuration).config.transformed" />
  </Target>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <PostBuildEvent>xcopy "$(SolutionDir)Web.$(Configuration).config.transformed" "$(SolutionDir)Web.config" /R /Y</PostBuildEvent>
  </PropertyGroup>