Best practices to handle Azure connection strings

Question

I have an application that I am just migrating to Azure. Currently I use web.config transformation to manage changing the database connecting string dev/staging/prod environments. How is it best to manage these multiple connection strings in Azure?

Answer 1

In cases where it doesn't matter if the developer can see production credentials, you can use the built-in Visual Studio 10 config transformations. If this is what you're looking for, follow these steps:

1.Navigate to your Azure project folder in file explorer
2. Make a copy of ServiceConfiguration.cscfg
3. Rename copy to ServiceConfiguration.Base.cscfg
4. For each build configuration (e.g. Dev, Staging, Production), create a ServiceConfiguration.<build config name>.cscfg file. In these files, you can use the normal config transformation syntax
5. Open your .ccproj file in a text editor
6. Find the following node,

<ItemGroup>
    <ServiceDefinition Include="ServiceDefinition.csdef" />
    <ServiceConfiguration Include="ServiceConfiguration.cscfg" />
</ItemGroup>

and replace it with this (you will have to edit this block to match your build configs):

<ItemGroup>
    <ServiceDefinition Include="ServiceDefinition.csdef" />
    <ServiceConfiguration Include="ServiceConfiguration.cscfg" />
    <None Include="ServiceConfiguration.Base.cscfg">
        <DependentUpon>ServiceConfiguration.cscfg</DependentUpon>
    </None>
    <None Include="ServiceConfiguration.Dev.cscfg">
        <DependentUpon>ServiceConfiguration.cscfg</DependentUpon>
    </None>
    <None Include="ServiceConfiguration.Staging.cscfg">
        <DependentUpon>ServiceConfiguration.cscfg</DependentUpon>
    </None>
    <None Include="ServiceConfiguration.Production.cscfg">
        <DependentUpon>ServiceConfiguration.cscfg</DependentUpon>
    </None>
</ItemGroup>

7.Add the following at the end of the .ccproj file, just above </Project>:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets" />
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
    <TransformXml Source="ServiceConfiguration.Base.cscfg" Transform="ServiceConfiguration.$(Configuration).cscfg" Destination="ServiceConfiguration.cscfg" />
</Target>

8.If you're using a CI server that doesn't have Visual Studio 10 installed, you'll probably have to copy the C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web folder and its contents from a development machine to the server. Also, you might have to add a namespace to your ServiceConfiguration.*.cscfg files. Here's an example of ServiceConfiguration.Base.cscfg:

<sc:ServiceConfiguration serviceName="MyServiceName" osFamily="1" osVersion="*" xmlns:sc="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
  <sc:Role name="MyRoleName">
    <sc:Instances count="1" />
    <sc:ConfigurationSettings>
      <sc:Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="xxx" />
    </sc:ConfigurationSettings>
  </sc:Role>
</sc:ServiceConfiguration>

Answer 2

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.