visual studio publish choosing wrong web.config transform

Question

based on what i read, as long as you have a transform that matches the name of a publish profile, it should be applied, but this is not the case for me.

publish profiles

PublisProfiles
    dev.pubxml
    local.pubxml

transforms

 Web.Config
     Web.Debug.config
     Web.local.config
     Web.Release.config

when i publish using local config, i see this:

Transformed Web.config using  C:\...\Web.Release.config into obj\Release\TransformWebConfig\transformed\Web.config.

so it's using Release.config .. i opened up local.pubxml and tried changing this

<LastUsedBuildConfiguration>Release</LastUsedBuildConfiguration>

to:

<LastUsedBuildConfiguration>local</LastUsedBuildConfiguration>

but then it's using Web.Debug.config transform.

dev, release, local transforms are identical aside from a few transformed properties ..

Answer 1

My problem with that had to do with the platform configuration:

At the Configuration Manager window, you can choose the config name ("Active solution configuration" combobox) and the target platform ("Active solution platform" combobox). I correctly made the setup of my new configuration ("MyStagingConfig", say) for each project, but forgot about the platform - so I configured it all in "Mixed platform".

When I published the project using "MyStagingConfig - Any CPU", it transformed the config with the Web.Staging.config file, instead of Web.MyStagingConfig.config. After a little headache, I realised that the "Any CPU" platform, which I hadn't configured, was configured by default to publish the project with the "Staging" config (as I had imported the settings from the "Staging" config when creating "MyStagingConfig").

Answer 2

The publish pipeline should be using both your profile's transform and the build configuration transform.

The logic for this is that your profile transform probably has destination-specific settings (e.g. which connection strings to use in Production vs. Staging), but your build configuration has build-specific settings (e.g. Debug has debugging related settings but Release turns them off). Allowing you to mix and match these gives greater flexibility (need to publish to Staging with debug settings enabled? Just use the Debug build configuration with the Staging profile). Settings from web.YourProfile.config will always overrule any prior transforms.