Question

I have a class library shared between an Azure Worker Role and a ASP.NET Website. A method in the library needs to pull a value from the config to determine if it should send an email or not.

In the ASP.NET site, the setting is in web.config:

<add key="SendEmails" value="true"/>

And in the Azure worker role it is in ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg:

<Setting name="SendEmails" value="true"/>

What I am trying to do is have my class library be able to access either config setting, depending on what environment it is running under.

Answer 1

Create your own class to retrieve configuration values and in it you’ll have items like this:

if (RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)
 return RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("mySetting");
else
 return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["mySetting"].ToString();

RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable will detect is supposed to detect if you’re in the Windows Azure fabric and return true. It will require that you include the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime assembly/referrence in your ASP.NET project.

I did a blog post on this topic if you want more information.