Web.Config Transformations when Debugging

I am a big fan of the Web.Config Transformations that got introduced with a while back. Prior to them being inherently supported one could accomplish the same thing with part of the Enterprise Library, and prior to that one could leverage a custom MSBuild Task or the XMLPoke Task to get your web.config updated based on the environment it was targeting.

Having your configuration elements managed with a transform file makes it a bit easier to manage and keep track of your settings that could change based on environment or settings. Without this each developer on your team might need to create host entries and keep their folder structure the same to ensure the settings work for each of their machines. Another option is each team member just has their own configuration files with their specific settings that they need but when source control is introduced this can get tricky because one developer might be overwriting another's settings.

Unfortunately, VS.Net doesn't do any transforming when you are developing and just debugging your local environment. But there are some steps you can do to make this happen if you want.

• First, create the configurations you want in VS.Net, assuming the default debug and release are not enough for what you are trying to accomplish.
• Right click on you web.config and select Add Config Transforms - this will create a dependant transformation config for each of your configurations defined.
• Now you can rename your web.config to web.base.config.
• Add a web.config to your project. It doesn't matter what is in it because it will get overwritten every time we do a build but we want it part of the project so VS.Net doesn't give us the "Your Project isn't configured for Debugging" pop-up.
• Edit your .csproj Project File and add the following TransformXml task to the AfterBuild target. Here you can see I will be transforming the web.base.config file using the web.[configuration].config and it will save it as web.config.

For aesthetics, I renamed my transformation files to just web.[configuration].config instead of web.base.[configuration].config and updated the project file like below:

So the transformation files are nested under the web.base.config and the web.config doesn't have any transformation files because it is the output not the input. Below you can see the setup I have so far for the Ergo project where my web.config would look quite different depending on if I am using Ektron or NHibernate as my data repository.

CodeProject

Unit Testing with an InMemory Database and NBuilder

I am throwing a lot of cycles to my Ergo project lately. I will go into more detail of the Ergo project later when it starts to take more shape and get some legs but one thing it is allowing me to do is get back to a true TDD project. A couple of cool things I have introduced to my unit tests are NBuilder and leveraging Fluent NHibernate and SQLite InMemory to make testing the NHibernate layer a bit easier.

When using NHibernate you generally only need to test 3 things:

• The Properties are being persisted
• Cascading works as expected
• Queries return the correct results

By using an in memory SQLite database we can do this testing while keeping our unit tests nice and speedy. Below is my InMemoryDatabaseTest class that my unit tests can inherit from to test our NHibernate layer.

Now that we have our InMemoryDatabaseTest class setup, we can structure our unit tests like below. One nifty class I found today that you will see in the screenshot is the Builder class. This is from http://nbuilder.org/ and http://code.google.com/p/nbuilder/. So instead of having to create a new Page instance and populate it with a bunch of dummy data I can just use 1 line of code to new up a Page which I can then persist to the InMemory database and then use it to Assert against when I query.

Dev Magic Fake Framework Released

I have been playing around with this framework this weekend and it is really cool. It allows you to work in a particular layer of your application without having to make sure all the plumbing and the other layers are in place. I will post a more detailed blog entry in a few days but I wanted to get this out there now to get the word out.

http://mohamedradwan.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/dev-magic-fake-video-tutorial/