Friday, April 24, 2015

Managing .config files across distributed development teams and different environments

If you work with a distributed global development team (like most people nowadays), one of the major development frustrations is that settings in configuration files such as App.config or Web.config will differ from development team to development team across the globe (or even from developer to developer)! 

So what does this mean?

This means that inevitably when you go into your Source Control repository (such as Team Foundation Server), you will see nearly every person on the team has a pending edit or check-out on the Web.config file or App.config file for every project that leverages one of these configuration files.

Of course, you can use Configuration Transforms/Configuration Transformations to somewhat alleviate this issue, but how many Configuration Transforms are you going to create and manage in your Source Control Repository?  In addition, Configuration Transforms were originally meant for deployment and release management scenarios rather than specific developer environment configurations.

As you can probably guess, this scenario makes the process of managing .config files extremely burdensome for most globally distributed development teams.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has not yet offered a good solution to resolve this issue with handling configuration files and it continues to remain a problem for developers and development teams worldwide.  Even with extensions like SlowCheetah to simplify the managing of Configuration Transformations (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/69023d00-a4f9-4a34-a6cd-7e854ba318b5), this problem is not yet resolved. 

Well, with the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2015, this is a good opportunity to let Microsoft know about your frustrations with this entire Configuration File Management process and let your voice be heard!

If you agree that this is a major development problem and roadblock, then please vote for this UserVoice item here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/7691724-make-it-easier-to-manage-config-files-across-dist

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