Developer specific app.config/web.config files in Visual Studio

Question

We have several .NET projects where we store certain settings in configuration files.

Now each developer will have their own configuration files that differ a little

Answer 1

Assuming you are using Visual Studio, why don't you use different Solution Configurations? For example: you can have a Debug config which uses Web.config.debug and a Release config which uses Web.config.release. Web.config.debug should have something like

<appSettings file="C:/Standard_Path_To_Configs/Standard_Name_For_Config.config"> 

with the file Standard_Name_For_Config.config that gots all the personal developer settings, while the Web.config.release always has the production settings. You can store default configs in some source controlled folder and make a new user take them from there.

Answer 2

Ignore the files and have a Commom_Web.Config and Common_App.Config. Using a continuous integration build server with build tasks which rename these two to normal names so that the build server can do its job.

Answer 3

We have the same problem and what we are doing is

• Check in the web.config with testserver / production values
• Developer goes to windows explorer and change the read only mode of the file
• Edit the config to suit to their environment.
• Check in into the web.config happens only when deployment values changes or any config entry is added or deleted.
• This needs a good amount of comment for each config entry as it needs to be changed by each dev

Answer 4

We use a system that combines several of the existing answers on this page, plus draws on this suggestion by Scott Hanselman.

In short, what we did was to have a common app.config / web.config, and to have most of the specific settings in individual files, as suggested by other answers here. e.g. for our SMTP settings, the app.config contains

<system.net>
  <mailSettings>
    <smtp configSource="config\smtp.config" />
  </mailSettings>
</system.net>

This file is in source control. However, the individual files, like this, are not:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
  <network host="127.0.0.1" port="25" defaultCredentials="false" password="" userName ="" />
</smtp>

That's not quite where the story ends though. What about new developers, or a fresh source installation? The bulk of the configuration is no longer in source control, and it's a pain to manually build all of the .config files they need. I prefer to have source that will at least compile right out of the box.

Therefore we do keep a version of the .config files in source control, named .config.default files. A fresh source tree therefore looks like this:

Still, not really any use to the developer, since to Visual Studio they're just meaningless text files. Hence the batch file, copy_default_config.bat, takes care of creating an initial set of .config files from the .config.default files:

@echo off
@REM Makes copies of all .default files without the .default extension, only if it doesn't already exist. Does the same recursively through all child folders.
for /r %%f in (*.default) do (
    if not exist "%%~pnf" (echo Copying %%~pnf.default to %%~pnf & copy "%%f" "%%~pnf" /y)
)
echo Done.

The script is safely re-runnable, in that developers who already have their .config files will not have them overwritten. Therefore, one could conceivably run this batch file as a pre-build event. The values in the .default files may not be exactly correct for a new install, but they're a reasonable starting point.

Ultimately what each developer ends up with is a folder of config files that looks something like this:

It may seem a little convoluted, but it's definitely preferable to the hassle of developers stepping on each other's toes.

Answer 5

We are using machine.config to avoid having differences in web.config between the environments.

Answer 6

In your Web.config use source from other files

<configuration>
    <connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config" />
...
</configuration>

Keep the web.config in version control and don't do it for ConnectionStrings.config. Now all developers have one file for the connection string.

You can do this for all the settings that are local dependant.