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How to produce environment specific config file?

A typical software development life cycle involves 3 environments
1. Development
2. Staging/Testing
3. Production/Live

Often while developing web application, you need to reconfigure the web.config file so that it has correct setting (e.g. database, debug flags, error handling etc) depending on the environment.

I have seen project horrors when development settings have gone live or development servers are pointing to live servers and users have accidentally deleted live data!!

I think Microsoft must have realized this over years and have finally introduced a solution in VS2010. It is a very simple but powerful idea: you have one config file but apply transformation when you build the project for each environment.

You can read the complete details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2009/05/04/web-deployment-web-config-transformation.aspx

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