How do you deal with connection strings when deploying an ASP.NET site?

Question

Right now our test and production databases are on the same server, but with different names. Deploying has meant editing Web.config to change all the connection strings for th

Answer 1

I've recently been leaning towards config manipulation on the continuous integration server. That's because we've had problems with multiple web.config, web.qa.config, web.production.config keeping the 95% of the file that should be the same in sync.

In a nutshell: there's only the one web.config in source control and it's the development configuration (debug friendly, local db, etc.). The build server does the compile, then a deploy to the canary site, then the package for release candidate.

We're using nant, so it's the .build file that has xmlpoke to set debug="false", alter connection strings, and whatever else needs to change in the canary copy and the packaging copy of the web.config.

The build machine's deploy is called "canary" because it's the first thing to die if there's a problem.