Is the ASP.NET web.config file getting out of hand?

Question

Heres something I've been pondering for a while ...

Do you struggle with the size and the number of entries in the web.config file? Do you understand every element?

Is it time for Microsoft to relook at how an ASP.NET site is configured, perhaps by splitting the web.config file into multiple files?

Answer 1

They did.

In ASP.Net 4.0, all of the standard Web.config entries for ASP.Net AJAX sites are in Machine.config, allowing new Web projects to start with an (almost) empty Web.config.

In addition, VS2010 allows you to combine multiple web.config files during a build.

Answer 2

Man I HATE the web.config file - it's a complete mess. As the previous answerer mentioned, this has been trimmed and tidied up in ASP.NET 4.

However, for those of us stuck with earlier tech (e.g. ASP.NET3.5, VS2008 etc.), you can still split it up into multiple files to make it more manageable by using the configSource attribute.

See this article