I am developing a C# windows service application, which have different configura

Question

I am developing a C# windows service application, which have different configuration files for development, for production system, for test system, like:

Dev.config
Test.config
Prod.config
Now we are using SVN version control system, and configuration files stored in projects directories:

-trunk
-MyFooService
    -Configs
      Dev.config
      Test.config
      Prod.config
-MyFooService2
    -Configs
      Dev.config
      Test.config
      Prod.config
Prior publishing service to production you should get respective configuration file from that folders. How do you think, it is correct? Or configuration files should be placed in another repository? Or in another folder or should not be placed in VCS?

Or may be it will be better to place files like that:

-trunk
-src
    -MyFooService
    -MyFooService2
-configs
    -MyFooService
      -Configs
        Dev.config
        Test.config
        Prod.config
    -MyFooService2
      -Configs
        Dev.config
        Test.config
        Prod.config

Explanation / Answer

What we've come up with is the following. We only place one config file under version control. It contains the settings of the development environment. It serves two purposes. One, if a developer opens a project and runs it, it should just work (see also the Joel test :)). Two, it serves as a template only. You shouldn't actually store actual configuration settings in version control, but these are two very good reasons to make an exception with the development settings, out of necessity.

When we publish a project to a server, we never overwrite configuration files, we only merge changes into it if there were any. The problem you are facing is that environments can change all the time, you can add new environments or modify existing ones, and these environment changes may have nothing to do at all with your development cycle. Even more importantly, we have no control at all over the clients' environments. Why would we want to store those settings in our version control? When we give a published project to our clients, we rename the config files to config.sample, they are forced to edit it according to their needs.

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