.NET Configuration (app.config/web.config/settings.settings)

Question

I have a .NET application which has different configuration files for Debug and Release builds. E.g. the debug app.config file points to a development SQL Server which has d

Answer 1

We used to use Web Deployment projects but have since migrated to NAnt. Instead of branching and copying different setting files we currently embed the configuration values directly in the build script and inject them into our config files via xmlpoke tasks:

In either case, your config files can have whatever developer values you want and they'll work fine from within your dev environment without breaking your production systems. We've found that developers are less likely to arbitrarily change the build script variables when testing things out, so accidental misconfigurations have been rarer than with other techniques we've tried, though it's still necessary to add each var early in the process so that the dev value doesn't get pushed to prod by default.