Azure Connection Strings

Connection string data should always be removed of obfuscated in source control.  There are many approaches to accommodating this. Scott Hanselmann has a great post on this.  Azure makes this even easier if you’re hosting a web app that’s referencing a database somewhere.

To enable simply click on the web app in question through the Azure dashboard.   Click on the “Configure” tab and look for the “Connection Strings” section about 3 quarters down.  In the “NAME” enter the name of your connection and in the “VALUE” enter the connection string.  So for example in my web.config I have the following:

<connectionStrings>
 <add name="DB_Dev" connectionString="Server=tcp:mydbserver.database.windows.net,1433;Database=mydatabase;User Id=Bob;Password=mysecretpassword;Encrypt=True;TrustServerCertificate=False;" />
 </connectionStrings>

This then appears in Azure config as follows:

I can then change my local dev config settings to whatever local dev instance I’m working on.