How do you deal with connection strings when deploying an ASP.NET site?

Question

Right now our test and production databases are on the same server, but with different names. Deploying has meant editing Web.config to change all the connection strings for th

Answer 1

Use a Web Deployment Project and update the wdproj file (it's just an MSBuild file) with some post build tasks to output the correct .config file. I keep a web.config and web.release.config then use this in the wdproj file:

More information

A simpler solution some like is using configSource property of appSettings and connectionStrings and then never overwriting that file on the production server.