I have previously explained how to properly configure your web deployment projects to replace web.config sections.  The example I used was pretty standard – swap out connection strings to support the specific deployment environment.  It worked great, right?  Well, today this technique complete fell short for me as I was dealing with a custom section.  [...]

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Ben Griswold on June 12th, 2010

I bounced around between projects a lot last week.  What each project had in common was the need to validate at least one SQL connection.  Whether you have SQL tools like SSMS installed or not, this is a very easy task if you are aware of the UDL (Universal Data Link) files.  Create a new [...]

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Ben Griswold on April 7th, 2010

In this episode, Noah and I explain how to use Web Deployment Projects to deploy your web application. This screencast will get you up and running, but in a future screencast, we discuss more advanced topics like excluding files, swapping out the right config files per environment, and alternate solution configurations.  This screencast (and the [...]

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Ben Griswold on April 2nd, 2010

I wrote about implementing a custom profile provider inside of your ASP.NET MVC application yesterday. If you haven’t read the article, don’t sweat it.  Most of the stuff I write is rubbish anyway. Since you have joined me today, though, I might as well offer up a little tip: you can run into trouble, like [...]

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Ben Griswold on March 8th, 2010

Last week, I gave an in-house presentation on cloud computing.  I walked through an overview of cloud computing – characteristics (on demand, elastic, fully managed by provider), why are we interested (virtualization, distributed computing, increased access to high-speed internet, weak economy), various types (public, private, virtual private cloud) and services models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.)  Though [...]

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Ben Griswold on January 7th, 2010

One may quickly build and deploy an ASP.NET web application via the Publish option in Visual Studio.  This option works great for most simple deployment scenarios but it won’t always cut it.  Let’s say you need to automate your deployments. Or you have environment-specific configuration settings. Or you need to execute pre/post build operations when [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 23rd, 2009

SubText is the engine behind our company blog. With the goal of ensuring a smooth transition between the main website and the blogs, I spent some time tightening up the styles for the aggregate and individual blogs last week.  This required a custom SubText skin and lot of css tweaking. Though I’ve previously had the [...]

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Ben Griswold on July 28th, 2008

For the first time in years, I needed to distribute my application to the end user’s machine via an online download.  To do this effectively and professionally, I, of course, needed an install package.  Over the year, I have used both Wise and InstallShield but they both cost money and I don’t recall them being [...]

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