Question

I created an app.config transform for my WinForms project using Dan Abramov’s solution here. Works great and the config file is transformed and present in the correct obj folder.

When I look at the outputs for the Primary Output of my application, it gets the app.config from the project directory instead of the corresponding obj folder like everything else…a big oversight, in my opinion, by MSFT. Obviously, they didn’t have transforms in mind for all config file types.

So now, how do I get the Primary Output of my main project to output the config file from the obj folder based on the build configuration?

Answer 1

I found the work around I was looking for here. Scroll to the bottom and see kakoskin’s answer. In conjunction with Dan Abramov’s solution, I was able to get the results I was looking for. Here’s the MSBuild code I used:

  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="exists('app.$(Configuration).config')">
<TransformXml Source="app.config" Destination="$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetFileName).config" Transform="app.$(Configuration).config" />
<!-- Force build process to use the transformed configuration file from now on. -->
<ItemGroup>
  <AppConfigWithTargetPath Remove="app.config" />
  <AppConfigWithTargetPath Include="$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetFileName).config">
    <TargetPath>$(TargetFileName).config</TargetPath>
  </AppConfigWithTargetPath>
</ItemGroup>
<TransformXml Source="App.config" Transform="app.$(Configuration).config" Destination="App.Transformed.config" />

The <ItemGroup> section will remove the app.config file from the corresponding obj\ folder and replace it with the transformed config file, which is not needed but I left it in there anyways.

Hope this helps others out as well!