Visual Studio 2010 can apply Debug or Release transformations to Web.config, but what about the Azure settings?

Question

Do I have to manually edit the Azure connection strings myself to switch between production and development, or is there something comparable to the Transformation Visual St

Answer 1

First a question, are you referring to configuration settings in the traditional configs? Or in the cloud service config (cscfg)?

If the later, then ATM I'm not aware of any support for configuration transformation. The approach I've seen most folks taking is to maintain number configuration files and use the appropriate file when doing your azure deployment.

This subject also touches on usage of the "Staging" environment. I've seen some folks using it as a parallel testing environment. In practice, its more affective to use it as a staging area to smoke test a new deployment before rolling it into production. If you have a need for a longer term test environment, I've found it better to deploy those services to their own unique namespaces that are then sandboxed away from the production services.

This again touches on ALM best practices for Azure (versioning, deployments, etc..). Something I believe the PNP team is working on and will hopefully have recommendations for soon.