January 17th, 2008

Tips & Tricks: Web Server Settings for Web Application Projects now can be stored per user as well as per project

Web server settings, which are accessible inside Web Application Projects (WAPs) property pages (Web section)  allow you to specify settings associated to to Visual Studio Development Server or IIS.  Many a times in a team development environment it is preferred that these settings are shared across the teams providing consistency; at the same time many other teams prefer that these settings be developer specific.

To support both of these scenarios in Visual Studio 2008 the web server settings now has an additional checkbox as highlighted below:

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By default this check box comes checked and it implies that these settings will be stored in the project file (i.e. .csproj or .vbproj) and when opened in an XML editor will look as below :

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When the check box above is unchecked then the settings are transferred to .csproj.user / .vbproj.user file located in the project folder and “SaveServerSettingsInUserFile” node value is changed to True in the project file…  This setting is especially useful when a team wants to allow per developer settings while checking in the project files in a source control system like TFS or VSS.

If you are using Visual Studio 2005 then we have created a hotfix to support this model. The explanation above still holds true for VS 2005, although in VS 2005 you will not have the property pages checkbox to make the change to “SaveServerSettingsInUserFile” property.  You will still be able to make the change manually in .csproj and .vbproj file.  You can read more about this in the KB Article 942844.   Hope this will help…

Vishal R. Joshi | Program Manager | Visual Studio Web Developer

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