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App.Config Transformations: The community shines where Microsoft drops the ball

Fri, 08/26/2011 - 08:03 |  Robert MacLean

Last year May, I spoke at DevDays Durban about what is new in ASP.NET 4? One of the highlights of that talk is a feature called Web.Config transforms. In short you have a base web.config and then a file per compiler target (i.e. RELEASE, DEBUG). These extra files contain rules on how to transform your web.config when it is published.

In a way of an example you have might your web.config to use your local SQL Server when in Visual Studio, but when you publish a DEBUG build to testing it changes the config to use the test SQL Server. Or when you publish to production it turns off a bunch of logging and shows friendly error messages.

image

There is TWO caveats in this process:

  1. ONLY works for ASP.NET* projects as this is something the ASP.NET team built into their publishing tool support.
  2. ONLY works for publish, if you have an ASP.NET* project and hit F5, nothing happens Sad smile

*ASP.NET = ASP.NET Core, and thus systems that build on top of it (WebForms, MVC & WebPages) all get it.

This is something we need in EVERY project type and we need with F5. Thankfully some bright people did just that for us, with the VS add-in Slow Cheetah.

So now you get the full experience on any project type, PLUS you get a brilliant feature missing in the ASP.NET one – PREVIEW. You can see what the resulting config will look like!

Tags: .NET, ALM, Annoyances, Development, Microsoft, Tools & Apps
August 26, 2011 – Learn TFS Daily | Learn TFS's picture

[...] App.Config Transformations: The Community Shines Where Microsoft Drops the Ball from Robert MacLean [...]

Submitted by August 26, 2011 – Learn TFS Daily | Learn TFS on Fri, 08/26/2011 - 16:32.

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