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I have a number of web apps in a suite. I use Web Deploy to publish the deployment packages that I build with Visual Studio. With these packages comes a SetParameters.xml file that can be used to modify values in the web.config. Several values are done automatically, such as connection strings, but one can add a parameters.xml file to a project in order to specify values that should be parameterizable:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
     <parameters>
         <parameter name="Sharepoint service principal name"
                    description="The principal name of the Sharepoint service."
                    defaultValue="host/108.125.111.137">
              <parameterEntry kind="XmlFile"
                              scope="\\Web\.config$"
                              match="/configuration/system.serviceModel/client/endpoint/identity/servicePrincipalName/@value"/>
         </parameter>
    </parameters>

My question is: if all of my web apps have an app setting in web.config with the same key and value that I want to modify at deployment, how can I avoid duplicating the particular parameter in every parameters.xml file? Is there a way to put this tag in a single location and have each parameters.xml reference that common location instead?

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If you are using the VS2010 RTM Web Publishing, then no.

However, if you are using VS2012 (or VS2010 + Azure SDK), you can simply define parameter files declaring an additional ParametersXMLFiles in your project file, wpp.targets or publish profile:

<ItemGroup>
  <ParametersXMLFiles Include="$(SolutionDir)\CommonParameters.xml" />
<ItemGroup>

These would be merged with the Parameters.xml in each project's root and with any parameters declared in your "Package" publish profile using MsDeployDeclareParameters.

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4 Comments

Thanks, Richard. We're using VS2010, unfortunately. But I just took a quick look through the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file, and I can't see why the same solution wouldn't work. I should note that I'm looking at it on a build server, which only has a Visual Studio Shell on it. All of the build/deploy is done by calling MSBuild with a custom build script.
Yup, it works on my VS2010 RTM, too. I put this into my project files and it worked like a charm. Finally! Thanks!
FYI, the best way to find out new stuff like this is to search through %programfiles%\msbuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Microsoft.Web.Publish.targets for the nearest thing you know about ("Parameters.xml") in this case.
Update: targets file is at "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets" in VS 2010 SP1

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