Visual Studio 2010 can apply Debug or Release transformations to Web.config, but what about the Azure settings?

Do I have to manually edit th开发者_如何学编程e 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