title: Storing EF database connection strings in Silverlight project
body: <p>We're a team of 4 developers working on the same project. We use Entity Framework to access our SQL database backend. We store the connection string in web.config.</p>
  
  <p>Each developer is testing his code towards his own local SQL server database. This means that each developer has his own SQL Server connection string in web.config. I typically have several different copies of the database on my machine, with data from different scenarios, which I switch between by editing the connection string. One database may be empty, another may contain huge amounts of test data and so on.</p>
  
  <p>The problem we're facing is that we accidentally check in the web.config into source control regulary, which means that when one of the other developers on a team retrieves latest code from source control, his local web.config - with his connection string - will be overwritten with the one from the other developer. (We're using AccuRev by the way, in which there's no good way to ignore certain files).</p>
  
  <p>I've thought of a couple of different hackish solutions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Create a new configuration file, where we store computer-specific configurations. We don't check in this file in source control. Or we check it in using some other name.</li>
  <li>Rename web.config to web.config.default (or something) in source control. After a checkout from source control, the developer has to rename web.config.default to web.config before he can run.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Surely there must be som standard way of handling this?</p>