In beta1 of ASP.NET 2.0 there were two providers available to access application management data database. MS Access provider was default one. Access mdb file was created on demand and stored in Data application folder. In beta2 things were changed. Now we have only one AspNetSqlProvider. Personally I love single radio button configuration touch in ASP.NET website configuration tool :-) :
Still, default application configuration database behaves pretty much the same way. SQLEXPRESS database file is created by demand in
App_Data folder. It is not best solution for all deployment scenarios.
I have been asked couple of times lately how to setup ASP.NET 2.0 application to store settings in non-default database. Let's say we want to use centralized MS-SQL server instead of CQLEXPRESS files in App_Data directory for each application. With beta2 we can easily achieve this. Management database connection string is defined by "
LocalSqlServer" entry in
connectionStrings section of config file. We can add following section to Web.config to access database of our choice:
<connectionStrings>
<remove name="LocalSqlServer"/>
<add name="LocalSqlServer"
connectionString="Data Source=SqlServerName;Initial Catalog=aspnetdb;Integrated Security=True"
providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>
</connectionStrings>
Note: You can use aspnet_regsql GUI driven utility to setup new or configure existing configuration database. This simple utility installed with .NET 2.0 SDK and can be accessed from Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt.