Question

Can anyone suggest a good way to manage multiple web.config files?

For example, I have a development web.config I use on my localmachine named ‘localWeb.config’ and then one I use for production called ‘prodWeb.config’. I keep the .config extensions so no one can access them from the web server.

localWeb.config will for example have a connection string to a development database while prodWeb.config has one to the production database.

Currently, I am using a postbuild event that will copy the contents of localWeb.config or prodWeb.config to web.config. This works well but I was wondering if anyone knew of any better ways.

Answer 1

Check out the Web Deployment Tool:

Here are just a few of the tasks that be accomplished using the tool:

1. Create a package that contains content, configuration and SQL databases for deployment or sharing with others.

2. Use the package as a way to version your application or create backups.

3. Add parameters to replace a connection string or other value in a file during install of a package.

4. Enable non-administrators to deploy packages and granularly control their access.

5. Synchronize or migrate both sites and servers running IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0.