Hi Imar,

I am just coming to the end of Chapter 16 and at this point I have no issues regarding understanding what is going on. That said however, a question has been raised in my mind when I consider what I need to use when developing a site and running a site live with my web host.

My own web host does not allow me to define my own database names and therefore the ASPNETDB catalog will be called something else. This means that depending whether I am developing the site on my own machine or running the site with my web host I will need differently configured web.config files with the correct connection information.

I realise that I can simply copy saved web.config_Development or web.config_Live files to the web.config file but my question is, is there a specific ASP.NET way to overcome this issue or is there a more convenient/efficient way to overcome this issue of needing differently configured web.config files?

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

Kind regards,

Ian Ryder

Hi Ian,

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for web site projects. You can indeed maintain two copies, or never overwrite the live version and manually update other settings. Alternatively, and that's what I would suggest in this case, you can use the configSource attribute of the connection string element. This enables you to define the code for the connectionStrings element in a separate file. This way your main config file can be deployed while you should never overwrite the file with the connection strings (which remains a risk). Check out the section "Using External Configuration Files" in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.80).aspx

For Web Application Projects, Microsoft created a much better solution: web config transformations: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/...formation.aspx
Unfortunately, this is not available for web site projects, the project type that the Planet Wrox site uses.

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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Hi Imar,

Thanks for the information. I suspected that this would be the case but its good to know either way.

Talk to you again soon.

Cheers,

Ian