[SOLVED] Visual Studio 2017 Always Deploying in Development Mode

Visual Studio 2017 Always Deploying in Development Mode

I have an ASP.NET Core application that I'm attempting to perform web deploy to a server and no matter what build configuration I select in the profile wizard, it always deploys multiple appsettings files as well as the PDB files for the DLLs. Anyone know what could be causing this?

Solution

If you want to exclude .pdb files for release publishing, then you may disable their generation during release build by adding next property to .csproj file (found this here)

<PropertyGroup>
  <DebugType Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Release' ">None</DebugType>
</PropertyGroup>

Regarding any configuration (or not) file, it will be published based on CopyToPublishDirectory attribute value. So again, you may use Condition attribute and have something like this (just an idea):

<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Debug' ">
   <Content Update="appsettings.debug.json" CopyToPublishDirectory="Always"/>
   <Content Update="appsettings.release.json" CopyToPublishDirectory="Never"/>
</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Release' ">
   <Content Update="appsettings.debug.json" CopyToPublishDirectory="Never"/>
   <Content Update="appsettings.release.json" CopyToPublishDirectory="Always"/>
</ItemGroup>

But in general, it's better to depend on environment setting (Dev, Prod) when we are talking about configs.