Best way for app to determine what server it is on and customize config info?

[Ken Fine]

I would like to be able to move my ASP.NET applications to any of a number
of servers without changing code.

My apps do a lot of disk I/O and in some cases I might be specifying absoute
drive mappings for whatever bad reason. This will break if apps are
arbitrarily copied around.

I imagine I could centralize a bunch of configurations in web.config. If my
apps could reliably (and efficiently) identify what server they were running
off of, they could pick out the right settings for a particular server. This
need extends beyond the rather trivial example of drive mappings.

Can someone suggest a good way or ways?

Thanks,
-KF

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hi Ken,

From your description, you have developed an ASP.NET web application and
since your application will have many disk I/O accessing operations in the
application(which seriouly coupled with the machine's physical disk, path
structure), you're wondering a flexible way to make your application avoid
changing when deploy over different servers, correct?

Based on my experience, for ASP.NET application(or other .net
applications) that will deal with some machine specific (or changable)
things, it is a good practice to store those changable info in application
configuration file. Thus, we can modify and customize the configuration
file whenever deploy to a new server box.

For your scenario, you mentioned that

=============
If my apps could reliably (and efficiently) identify what server they were
running off of, they could pick out the right settings for a particular
server.
=============

would you give some further explanation on this? Do you mean you need to
programmtically get the current machine's name or you want the server
configuratino info of the current machine? .NET's built-in class
"System.Environment" has provide some static members give us some data of
the current machine(such as MachineName and SpecialFolders...). For other
machine specific info, you may use WMI interface to query some certain info
you want.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead



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[Ken Fine]

Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for, Steven. All I need is some
simple key for what machine is what, and System.Environment will tell me
that. Appreciate it.

-KF

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

My pleasure

Regards,

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead