Fixing .NET configuration hell with TeleSharp: Versioning configuration sections
Story:Bob is an IT Professional (ITPro) responsible for maintaining dozens of enterprise .NET applications. One day, Bob gets a call informing him that one of the applications he is responsible for have stopped working after some changes in the configuration were applied. After hours troubleshooting the application without any positive results, Bob decides to involve the developers who built the new version of the applications. A few hours later, one of the developers finally finds the configuration sections and component that introduced the. Bob wants to roll back the changes in the configuration file but he realizes that he doesn’t have a copy of the previous file and have to asks the developers to give him a copy of the old configuration file. Bob is very frustrated. Bob HATES .NET.
This story illustrates one
of the major challenges that ITPros faced when
maintaining .NET applications: Configuration file versioning.
Versioning is one of those aspects that have been long time missing in the .NET configuration experience. Configuration changes are a very intrinsic aspect of the lifetime of .NET enterprise applications. However, for years, we haven’t had any mechanisms for keeping track of the changes of the different sections in a configuration file. This situation has forced developers and IT professionals to established and enforce different processes to control the configuration changes in the different applications in an enterprise.