Question

I am using externalized config section for appsettings, to be able to have different ones per developer, like so:

  <appSettings configSource="appsettings.config" />

When I run mstest against this project (it’s a web application), it blindly modifies this section like so:

  <appSettings configSource="appsettings.config">
    <add key="microsoft.visualstudio.teamsystems.backupinfo" value="1;web.config.backup.af6ed449-e04a-4a52-99d6-b8df0b133316" />
    <add key="microsoft.visualstudio.teamsystems.aspnetdevserver:/" value="56917;True;3448;1;-8588944684513929784" />
  </appSettings>

Which is obviously wrong, even according to schema.

The reason it needs to modify this is to specify the information about Cassini/dev server that it’s going to run. I think that’s it, it doesn’t seem to modify any other section in the file (very hard to tell since it also completely reformats the file).

Question is, what choices do I have to get this to work?

So far I only came up with two practical ones, both sub-optimal

1. Abandon external config for appsettings

2. Switch from Cassini to cassinidev – then I can stop using
   [AspNetDevelopmentServer()]
   attribute, which is the one that
   results in web.config needing to be
   modified

3. Configure something in VS to prevent it from doing this. Why does
   it even care which port its own
   cassini is working on? I couldn’t
   find any config settings.

4. Wait for MS to fix this, so [AspNetDevelopmentServer()] would
   work with externalized appSettings

Answer 1

Bit of a delay, so I don’t know if this is still relevant for you….

But you can use the file= attribute of <appSettings> instead of configSource.
I.e:

 <appSettings file="appsettings.config" /> 

While configSource expects to just replace the entire section, file merges the sections. So even if you have child elements added, it will still add the additional elements from the external file.