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I’ve been looking for a clean solution to having a dynamic connection string for a LINQ to SQL data context. My primary desire for this is developing/debugging an application on a test database. Sure, you can always go change your connection string in the app.config file, but I tend to forget to revert it back before deployment.

After doing a bit of research today, I realized that if you open up the project’s property pages, click on the settings tab, and then click on ‘View Code’ on the top, you’ll access the “base” partial Settings class. In the constructor, add an event handler for the SettingsLoaded event handler:

this.SettingsLoaded += new System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventHandler(Settings_SettingsLoaded);

Then you can set up the event handler in a similar manner:

///
/// Dynamically update settings for development when a debugger is attached
///
void Settings_SettingsLoaded(object sender, System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventArgs e)
{
    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        // Adjust the connection string as you see fit
        this["yourConnectionStringName"] = "Data Source=yourDevHost;Initial Catalog=yourDevDatabase;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=yourDevUser;Password=yourDevPassword";
    }
}

I always love seeing people’s gravatars. What is a gravatar, you ask? It is the little picture next to your comments. If you don’t have an official gratavar, you just get a boring blue image with Gravatar’s logo. So, I now ask you, will you set up your gravatar? Go to http://www.gravatar.com. You register with the email address you use on your comments, upload a photo, and you are done. It will take a few minutes for it to show up. Not all blogs support it, but many do. It is always nice to put a face to a name!

Let me illustrate: