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.

With TeleSharp, we decided to enable versioning as a first class feature of the .NET configuration experience. When using TeleSharp, you can keep different versions of a .NET configuration file as illustrated in the following figure.

As highlighted in the previous figure, you can declare which version is current for a specific environment.

We also enable the capability of comparing different versions of a configuration file which helps developers and ITPros to understand the specific changes throughout the lifecycle of a configuration file.

Given that TeleSharp keeps a catalog of the different enterprise applications as well as the components of each application, developers and ITPros will have a detailed understanding of which applications are relying on the different versions of a configuration section.

What do you think? Are we doing configuration versioning the right way?

As always, remember that you can learn more about  TeleSharp at Tellago Studios website, check out the videos and request an evaluation copy.

• Jesus Rodriguez's blog