Environment Settings Manager

Most of you have probably struggled with the task of managing numerous runtime settings that vary across your deployment environments.  For example, your solution calls a web service to obtain some data, and your development environment uses one URL, while your test and production environments use two more distinct URL’s.  Your BizTalk binding files are a perfect example of this problem.

The Deployment Framework builds upon an open-source tool known as the Environment Settings Manager to help tackle this complexity.  The core of the solution is a simple, easy-to-use Excel workbook.  In this workbook, you may list out all of your runtime environments and all of your runtime settings in a simple matrix that also contains the actual values for each combination.  This gives you instant documentation and a simple method with which to maintain your settings and their values.

Using the Deployment Framework, when you deploy to a particular environment the Framework will automatically extract just that environment’s settings and values from the spreadsheet and deploy them to the BizTalk SSO database.  An included .NET class library allows easy access to the settings from your BizTalk solution at runtime.  You may also automatically extract setting values from the spreadsheet and utilize them anywhere in your Deployment Framework MSBuild build file.

All you need to get started with the Environment Settings Manager workbook is Excel 2003 or newer.

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