Different Build Modes

It is often useful to have different Visual Studio build modes in order to make better/more appropriate compilations of your projects for different environments, such as Development (your local dev machine), Staging (internal/client testing) and Production (final, fully live environment.)

To this end setting up VS properly is important and actually fairly simple. The process I use is thus:

• Create a \Configuration directory in the root of your web project
• Create \[build mode] directories for each build mode inside the \Configuration directory
• Open the web project properties panel, click "Build Events" and paste this into the first multi-line text box, titled "Pre-build event command line":

mkdir $(ProjectDir)Configuration\Current
copy $(ProjectDir)Configuration\$(ConfigurationName)\*.config $(ProjectDir)Configuration\Current

• Create empty ConnectionStrings.config and AppSettings.config files within each of \Configuration\[build mode] directories. These will need the initial empty elements for their appropriate config blocks, such as and
• Replace the above config blocks in your web.config file with element attributes pointing to the \Configuration\Current directory:

• Open the Solution Configurations drop down and select "Configuration Manager..." This is on the Standard toolbar and will probably show "Debug" as the default item.
• Create the appropriate build modes under "Active solution configuration". Select New... and just create a series of new configuration names, such as Development, Staging and Production. Copy the default settings from Debug, for ease of use.
• Using the Active solution configuration drop down, select each of the configuration modes you've just created and for each one click New... under the "Configuration" column for each project in your solution. When the New dialog opens, just create the configuration with the same name as the active solution's configuration: Development under Development and so on. Again, copy the Debug project configuration, for ease of use.
• After closing the configuration dialog, select a configuration mode from the drop down and hit Build -> Build Solution.

At this point you may discover the following exception when building:

The command "mkdir .........." exited with code n.

This happens because one of the files you're asking copy to work upon either doesn't exist, doesn't have permissions to access or the directory your command refers to simply isn't there.

Problem: The directory will be missing if your Visual Studio build mode is currently in, for example, Release and you've only got \Configuration directories for, eg, Development and Staging. The problem copy is hitting is that the \Release directory doesn't exist.

Solution: Change the current build mode to Staging or Development and all should be well.