Environmental Overrides

This post was originally published at http://solepano.blogspot.com
 

February 2007 CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0 includes a very cool feature called "Environmental Overrides". This feature provides the capability of defining different environments in your application's configuration, and overriding some of the configuration settings in these environments. This is very useful in common scenarios, such as having different connection strings in development, testing and production. For a more detail explanation of how this works, read here, directly from its creator.

The tool sounded very promising to me, but pitifully, I couldn't make it work. I found the following two issues:

1. When I generate the merged file for one environment (by clicking the "Save merged configuration" item of its context menu), the resulting file do not have the property's value overridden. This is an important problem for me, since it prevents the whole override feature to work. I reported this in more detail here, but the P&P people couldn't reproduce the bug.
2. After reopening the app.config file, and loading one delta file for an environment, the settings for my overridden properties do not appear as expected. I see the "Don't Override Properties" option instead. I have also reported this with no luck here.