Question

I have a MVC3 Web Application project that I develop and publish from Visual Studio 2012. This was recently a VS2010 project that was migrated.

My web.config is setup using a <location inheritInChildApplications="false"> tag so that a child application running in a virtual directory does not take on the settings.

I have setup a WebDeploy publish profile, which worked flawlessly in VS2010, but breaks my application when published from VS2012. It adds a <connectionStrings> node after the closing aforementioned </location> tag, even though I already have a <connectionStrings> node inside my <location> node. This breaks the app due to an invalid configuration file.

I’ve tried re-creating the profile from scratch which didn’t solve the problem.

Based on what I have read here, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465337.aspx, unchecking the “Use this connection string at runtime” checkbox should instruct the publish process to NOT add the connection string, but it does anyway.

I’m thinking that this would not be an issue if I wasn’t using the <location inheritInChildApplications="false">, because the connection string would get added to the right spot.

Also, note that if I publish to the File System instead of using WebDeploy, the published Web.Config is created correctly and does NOT have the extra connection string node added.

Are there any known workarounds for this issue?

Answer 1

As I suspected, this issue is related to the inheritInChildApplications attribute. It is likely a bug in the Visual Studio 2012 Web Deploy whereby the deploy process always adds the connection string to the configuration file, even if you tell it not to. In my case, it was also adding in the wrong spot, which broke my application.

To fix the issue, I simply stopped using the attribute and turned off configuration inheritance using one of the options listed here.

I can now publish without errors, but the process still adds the connection string to the deployed configuration file. Annoying but not a show stopper.