"Cleanly" Deploying an ASP.NET Application with LINQ to SQL Server
- by Bob Kaufman
In my development environment, my SQL Server is PHILIP\SQLEXPRESS. In testing, it's ANNIE, and the live environment will have a third name yet to be determined. I would have assumed that updating the following statement in web.config would have been enough:
<add name="MyConnectionString"providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"
connectionString="Data Source=PHILIP\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=MyDtabase;Integrated Security=True" />
When using SqlConnection, SqlCommand, SqlDataReader and friends, that's all it took. Using LINQ, it doesn't seem to work that nicely. I see the servername repeated in my .dbml file as well as in Settings.settings. After changing it in all of those places, I get it to work. However if I'm doing a few deployments per day during testing, I want to avoid this regimen.
My question is: is there a programmatic solution for LINQ to SQL that will allow me to specify the connection string once, preferably in web.config, and get everybody else to refer to it?
