Managing environments in distributed or cloud configuration in .NET

During development, testing and support stages of the project, there is usually a need to test or debug code against multiple environments: Local with and without Azure emulation, Dev environment, QA environment, UAT environment, perhaps even Prod environment, etc. Configuration changes can get very complicated when servers, URL’s, connection strings, etc. need to switch in unison when switching between different environments. In general, handling more than one environment from Visual Studio can be very laborious when the overall project structure is complex. Throwing Windows Azure in the mix only adds to debugging and deployment vows.