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My team is doing web development (ASP.NET, WCF), and we are at a beginning stage where everyone needs to make DB changes and use own sample data.

We use a dedicated DB server, and we want each developer to develop against separate DB.

What we appear to need is ability to configure connection string on per-developer basis in source controlled way. Obviously, we might have other configuration settings that need custom setting and finally, we'll need to maintain a set of configuration settings that are common to all developers.

Can anyone suggest a best practice here?

PS Similar issue appears when we want to deploy a built application to different environments (test, stage, production) without having to manually tweak configurations (except perhaps configuring the environment name).

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You can use config transforms for your deployment to different environments. That's easy enough. Scott Hanselman did a pretty awesome video on it here.

For your individual developer db problem, there isn't any particularly elegant solution I can think of. Letting each developer have a unique configuration isn't really a "best practice" to begin with. Once everyone starts integrating their code, you could have a very ugly situation on your hands if everyone wrote their code against a unique db and configuration set. It almost guarantees that code won't perform the same way for two developers.

Here is what I would recommend, and have done in the past.

  1. Create a basic framework for your database, on one database on your test db server.
  2. Create a Database Project as part of your solution.
  3. Use .Net's built in Schema Compare to write your existing database to the database project.
  4. When someone needs to change the database, first, they should get latest on the Database project, then make their changes, and then repeat step 4 to add their changes to the project.
  5. Using this method, it is also very easy for developers to deploy a local instance of the database that matches the "main" database, make changes, and write those changes back to the project.
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We already have a procedure for DB development like yours, and I agree that 'unique configurations' are certain to lead to different behaviors. We just wanted to have separate databases for each developer on a dedicated SQL Server machine, which requires separate connection strings. I guess over time we are likely to find couple more such settings that would make sense to be kept 'unique'. It's frustrating to be forced to use 'localhost' (i.e. have to run local SQL server) for the sake of uniform web.config.
Thanks for both suggestions. The deployment quick start was definitely useful, and it could even be tweaked to generate THE Web.Config on the fly for each of the environment, but as a non standard way, I wouldn't go that way. And Schema Compare also appears to work under certain assumptions. Sometimes it seems to choke (in order not to corrupt the data) upon a supposedly trivial table transformations.
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OK.

Maybe not so elegant solution, but we've chosen to read connection string from a different place when the project is built using Debug configuration.

We are using registry, and it has to be maintained manually.

It requires some extra coding, but the code to read the registry is only compiled in debug (#if debug), so there is no performance hit in production.

Hope this helps as well.

Cheers

v.

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