Windows Azure - Manage Service Configurations of Azure Application in Visual Studio 2010

Introduction:

In this article we are going to see how to use the new feature of Managing Multiple Service Configuration files using the Visual Studio 2010 tools provided for a Windows Azure Application.

Overview:

Managing service configuration files, is one of the new features provided with the August 2011 release with the option of handling more than one Service configuration files to make developers work much more easier. Check my previous articles for the complete listing of the new features and how to use Multiple Service configurations. Now let us see the step by step process of how to use this configuration tool to manage (Edit, Rename, Delete) the service configuration files.

Steps:

Open our Visual Studio 2010 Project which we created in our earlier example, and we can see the 2 service configuration files as shown in the screen below.

Now right-click on the project and select Manage Configurations options from the list as highlighted in the screen below.

We can now see a windows with the 2 service configuration files created (Cloud and Local) as shown in the screen below. Also we can see the options to manage our service configurations (Create Copy, Rename, Remove)

 
Renaming a Configuration file:
To rename a configuration file, just select the configuration file which we need to rename and click on the rename button and we can see an input box popped up to enter the new name to the service configuration file. We can rename the service configuration file as per our requirement and click on OK button once we are done.


 
Creating a Copy of Configuration file:
If we want to do some research and we need to create a copy of our Cloud Configuration file as backup, then we can use this option to create a copy of the configuration file. Select the configuration file which we need to create a copy and click on Create Copy Button as shown in the screen below.

We can now see a new configuration is created with the name Cloud1 as a copy of the cloud project and also at the Solution Explorer at the right side we can see 3 configuration files available as shown in the screen below.

 
Delete a Configuration File:
If we want to delete a configuration file we have a straight forward option like we can select the configuration file and click on Remove button. In our example we will select the Cloud1 configuration file and click on Remove. We can now see a confirmation dialog as shown in the screen below. Click on Delete to proceed further.

We can now see that Cloud1 configuration file has been permanently removed from the list as well from the Solution Explorer as shown in the screen below.

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen how to manage the multiple Service Configuration files using the Visual Studio 2010 IDE for Azure Application.