Question

So I have a VS 2010 solution containing one ASP.NET MVC 3 project and one SpecFlow project (with NUnit as test runner) to test the former. When testing under SpecFlow (by running the SpecFlow project), I’d like to change a parameter in the MVC application’s ConfigurationManager.AppSettings dictionary, to make it connect to a test database. This change does not seem to affect the running app however, so I guess the test and the app do not share state.

How can I share this application setting between the MVC app project and the SpecFlow project, so they use the same database?

Edit:
I found that the problem wasn’t really one of sharing settings between projects (MVC and SpecFlow), but rather between two processes. The reason is that I test MVC via WatiN, which means that the development server, running in a process of its own, is being exercised by the tests. As such the premise of my original question was wrong from the onset, and I consider Jason’s answer valid given the original premise.

Answer 1

In your test project (SpecFlow) create a new app.config (unless it’s already there) and add the appSettings section to that, with your test database connection string. IIRC the website will hopefully pick up the connection string from the appSettings of the test project, rather then the website.