Suppose I have a web.config parameter under <appSettings><add key="myParam" value="myValue"/></appSettings> and I want to modify the value for myParam depending on the publish profile I use, ie DEVELOPMENT.pubxml and TEST.pubxml for a web site deployment.
What is the most straightforward way to accomplish this? How do I specify in the pubxml which keys I want to transform, where they are, etc?
Either a direct answer or a link to a resource that answers this question would be highly appreciated.
You can create Web.config transform files for publish profiles as well as for build configurations. When you publish, either in Visual Studio or from the command line, Visual Studio applies both the appropriate build configuration transform and the publish profile transform. See this tutorial:
http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/deployment/visual-studio-web-deployment/web-config-transformations
This is one of a series of tutorials. Others in the series run through examples of creating publish profile transforms and examples of doing it from the command line.
The tutorials use a web application project. If by web site deployment you mean you're deploying a web site project, the process is basically the same as long as you have installed the latest VS update (see the first tutorial in the series for links to the VS update).
Related
My approach here may be wrong, so apologies if so - I'd appreciate any advice on what I did wrong.
I need to run (locally, for debugging), a specific configuration of a project that contains specific web.config transforms.
In my solution, in Configuration Manager I have the following listed:
Debug
Release
ClientFoo (copied from Release)
ClientBar (copied from Release)
I created a new entry, ClientXYZ (copied from Debug), then right-clicked web.config and chose Add Config Transform. I applied the transform rules, and when previewed, the transforms display correctly.
When I select ClientXYZ in the solution config drop down, and start the debugger...
...I see that the web.config used to initiate the application is the Debug one, and not my new ClientXYZ version.
Is it possible to run the project locally with web.config transforms applied, for debugging?
Web config transforms are only applied during publishing or building deployment packages by default (it does, after all, overwrite web.config). There is a way with some adjustments, however, described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35561167/1464084
The purpose of using "Debug" and "Release" in Visual Studio are:
Debug constant defined in Debug configuration when you are developing application
Release optimize code enabled in Release configuration when you host that application for client side testing or publishing
Custom (ClientXYZ) constant defined for a developer's own settings (localhost or different IP's) for both Client site hosting and publishing your site
The kpm pack command needs the runtime for the server - is it possible to install windows runtimes on osx just for the pack and deploy?
Ok, it seems that in order to recognise that the deployment is an aspnet vNext project and to handle that as a 'ProjectK Web Application deployment', you have to make it look like it all came from Visual Studio (or at least that was the only way I managed to get it to work right now)...
I did this by taking an example one from somewhere else...
I took a simple single vnext web project .sln file and changed the project name and project GUID.
I took the .kproj Visual Studio project file and did the same.
There isn't much that needs to be changed - only the name of the project and GUID. It's nice that there isn't any file lists in there so I feel that this might end up as a once-only activity...
I did find that there are some project structure rules that seemed to make it break. You seem to have to have the sln file in the top level folder and a folder underneath for the web project. If there is ONLY a web project then this might seem overkill, but I tried collapsing everything up to the top with the sln file correctly pointing, but that didn't work.
The other thing that you need to make sure you have is a reference to "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.IIS" in the project.json dependencies. Without this, the AspNet.Loader.dll and bin folder don't get deployed.
Apart from that, I am now able to use Sublime Text (or whatever I want on osx), test using "k kestrel", checkin through git and it gets deployed automatically to an azure web site! yippee!
Actually this makes much more sense because it is letting the target decide upon the binaries it needs to satisfy the deployments. Next challenge might be to get it to pull 'my' libraries from a custom NuGet source to get my binary libraries in there and avoid uploading ALL of the source to the website!
Oh - and another tip: Quit kestrel with 'Enter' for a clean quit instead of Z which leaves the port listening but non-functional!
My company are working at Sharepoint site that we are developing using Visual Studio. The actual installation at the customer is performed by scripts deploying the produced wsp-files. During normal development I mostly use deployment from directly from inside Visual Studio. Unfortunately I often run into problems when trying to deploy my solutions. We are using a server-farm set up, but each developer has their own virtual server, datebase instance and so on.
We have one project file that the define the basic content-type used for different department. This content-type typically define stuff like what period that the list item cover. Each department have their own project that uses the content type combined with department specific fields to form the final list.
One of my current problems is that when I make edits to the content type and deploy it the changes does not seem to propagate. Even though I rebuild the solution and deploy both the base project and the department project with success I still see the old version of the content fields when I create a new department list. Sometimes it helps to retract the projects, but often I literally have to restart everything before it works.
My question is if this problem is caused by Visual Studio not really deploying my new defintions or if there is some architectual aspect of Sharepoint 2010 that might prevent the change to propagate. What steps can I take to lessen the likelihood of the problem occuring?
Have you tried deleting the content type with Central Administration before doing a new deployment? I've found out that Sharepoint don't update/create content types when it finds other one with the same name.
Let's pretend that we have the following servers [dev, test, production] and that dev and test are very similar in configuration while production is quite different.
If I'm using web.config transforms that means I have to duplicate a lot of settings för Web.dev.config and Web.test.config. It would be very nice if I could use the same transform mechanism for my transforms so that test.config is based on dev.config.
I have thought of two possible approaches, i'm not sure any of them would work:
Try to get MSBuild to first transform dev.config and then run test.config against the result when we are running under test configuration
trying to get the transform mechanism to work for transformations files. I would somehow run test.config against dev.config and create a temporary file which I then use as as a transformation against Web.config.
Does anyone know if something like this is possible? And if so how would one go about to set it up?
The TransformXml is just an MSBUILD task that is invoked post compile. If you extend/mod your build you can have it run the transform task twice, or allow the normal run against your configurations, then provide a second file and use the task to perform that.
If you are familiar with msbuild, this is pretty simple. If not, reply/comment, and I'll try to provide examples later today.
But in the end, yes its possible, as I've had similar need on past projects.
I have even more configurations. And all of them synced with T4. See my answer here.
Although this has been answered I wanted to update it with an answer reflecting changes made in Visual Studio 2012 that make this considerably easier.
As of Visual Studio 2012 it is possible to "chain" build and publish profile transforms.
As such you can have a "Release" build transform that takes care of common configuration such as switching off debugging, switching on custom errors, and any number of "Publish" transforms which are associated with a publish profile, adding instance specific data such as connection strings and appSettings.
In VS 2012 (as well as the publishing updates for VS2010 through the
Azure SDK) now support the concept of publish specific transforms. You
can also now specify the project configuration used for a profile when
publishing on the publish dialog...
In this case I have created a profile named Production and set the
Configuration to Release. When I publish this project the following
transformations will be applied (if the files exist) in this order.
1.web.release.config
2.web.production.config
See Profile specific web.config transforms and transform preview for more information.
Do I have to manually edit the Azure connection strings myself to switch between production and development, or is there something comparable to the Transformation Visual Studio applies to Web.Config?
To add to what Brent has said. I use a special small configuration-only (Config) project that contains a folder for every deployment type - inside each folder there is a collection of .config and .cscfg files that are tailored toward a specific deployment (a few partial .config files too). During every compile via Pre-Build event step, Visual Studio copies the files from the correct folder into the root folder of that Config project.
This is the command I use in the Pre-Build Event Command Line:
xcopy /Y "$(ProjectDir)$(ConfigurationName)\*.config" "$(ProjectDir)"
xcopy /Y "$(ProjectDir)$(ConfigurationName)\*.cscfg" "$(ProjectDir)"
Every other project in the solution links to the configuration files from the root folder of the Config project.
I also use config transformations as well, for Production vs. Non-production environments. Everything non-Production (local development environment, Azure-QA development environment) has a lot of debug and tracing built in - errors are returned completely to the clients/etc. Production environment has that locked down.
Edit: wrote a blog about this finally: http://www.paraleap.com/blog/post/Managing-environments-in-a-distributed-Azure-or-other-cloud-based-NET-solution.aspx
As Brent pointed out, it is not a good idea to have Staging area to be a full-blown Testing site. It is more geared toward a quick smoke test as well as a great way to deploy a new package into Azure without taking your main site down. (IP swap between Production and Deployment usually does not cause any issues to users)
Hope this helps
First a question, are you referring to configuration settings in the traditional configs? Or in the cloud service config (cscfg)?
If the later, then ATM I'm not aware of any support for configuration transformation. The approach I've seen most folks taking is to maintain number configuration files and use the appropriate file when doing your azure deployment.
This subject also touches on usage of the "Staging" environment. I've seen some folks using it as a parallel testing environment. In practice, its more affective to use it as a staging area to smoke test a new deployment before rolling it into production. If you have a need for a longer term test environment, I've found it better to deploy those services to their own unique namespaces that are then sandboxed away from the production services.
This again touches on ALM best practices for Azure (versioning, deployments, etc..). Something I believe the PNP team is working on and will hopefully have recommendations for soon.
Like knightpfhor said, you can use Visual Studio config transformations if you edit the .ccproj file manually. My answer to a similar question lists the minimum number of steps required to get transformations working.
You can use CloudConfigurationManager in Azure SDK 1.7 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/LIBRARY/microsoft.windowsazure.cloudconfigurationmanager
This starts by looking in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg e.g. ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg for config setting. If it isn't there it falls back to web.config and app.config
For example
CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString")
Will look in the appropriate cscfgfile for StorageConnectionString setting, then it will search the web.config and then app.config.
The simple answer to your question is yes, but you have to mess around with the .ccproj file manually to do it. A full description on how to to do this can be found here