Different application settings depending on configuration mode

Maxim Gershkovich picture Maxim Gershkovich · Jun 22, 2010 · Viewed 28.7k times · Source

Is anyone aware of a way that I can set application (or user) level settings in a .Net application that are conditional on the applications current development mode? IE: Debug/Release

To be more specific, I have a url reference to my webservices held in my application settings. During release mode I would like those settings to point to http://myWebservice.MyURL.com during debug mode I would love those settings to be http://myDebuggableWebService.MyURL.com.

Any ideas?

Answer

ne1410s picture ne1410s · Dec 18, 2014

This is somewhat late to the party, but I stumbled upon a nice way of implementing the web.transform approach for app.config files. (i.e. it makes use of the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform)

I think it is "nice" because it is a pure xml approach and doesn't require 3rd party software.

  • A parent / default App.config file is descended from, according to your various build configurations.
  • These descendants then only override what they need to.

In my opinion this is much more sophisticated and robust than having to maintain x number of config files which get copied in their entirety, such as in other answers.

A walkthrough has been posted here: http://mitasoft.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/multipleappconfig/


Look, Mom - No explicit post-build events in my IDE!