Alex Rivera | Logout

Best way to switch configuration between Development/UAT/Prod environments in ASP.NET?

Asked 2008-09-25T12:04:27.557
10

I need to switch among 3 different environments when developing my web app - Development, UAT, and Prod. I have different database connections in my configuration files for all 3. I have seen switching these settings done manually by changing all references and then rebuilding the solution, and also done with preprocessor directives. Is there an easy way to do this based on some variable so that the configuration doesn't have to be revised when deploying to a new environment every time?

asp.net configuration
Edit
Report

1 Answer

3

I'm a big fan of using MSBuild, in particular the MSBuild Community Tasks (http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/) and there is an XSLT task to transform the web.config with the appropriate connection string settings, etc.

I keep these tasks handy:

<Target Name="Configs">
<Xslt RootTag="" Inputs="web.config" Output="Web.$(COMPUTERNAME).config" Xsl="web.config.$(COMPUTERNAME).xslt" Condition="Exists('web.config.$(COMPUTERNAME).xslt')" />

Obviously this isn't 100% what you're after, it's so each dev can have their own web.config.

But there's no reason you couldn't use the above principle to have multiple build configurations which applies the right XSLT.

My XSLT looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>


<!-- Dev -->
<xsl:template match="/configuration/connectionStrings/add[@name='MyConnectionString']/@connectionString">
    <xsl:attribute name="connectionString">Data Source=MyServer;Initial Catalog=MyBD;User ID=user;password=pwd</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="node()">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

answered 2008-09-25T12:14:22.137

Your Answer