Tim Van Wassenhove

In my current project i use TemplateFileTask (MSBuild Community Tasks Project) to generate configuration files. I ran into the problem that i don’t want to expose a MEX endpoint in production. This is my initial template file:

 <endpoint address="" binding="ws2007HttpBinding" contract="DemoService.IFileService" />
 ${MexEndpoint}
</service>

And here is my initial msbuild task:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBuildCommunityTasks\MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets"/>
 <Target Name="GenerateConfigFiles">
  <PropertyGroup>
   <MexEndpoint>
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
   </MexEndpoint>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Env)'=='Production' ">
   <MexEndpoint></MexEndpoint>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
   <Tokens Include="MexEndpoint">
    <ReplacementValue>$(MexEndpoint)</ReplacementValue>
   </Tokens>
  </ItemGroup>

  <TemplateFile Template="Web.template.config" OutputFileName="Web.config" Tokens="@(Tokens)" />
 </Target>
</Project>

This results in the following configuration file: (WCF does not like the xml namespace declaration):

 <endpoint address="" binding="ws2007HttpBinding" contract="DemoService.IFileService" />
 <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" />
</service>

I noticed that a smart collegue of mine came up with the following template file:

 <endpoint address="" binding="ws2007HttpBinding" contract="DemoService.IFileService" />
 <${MexBegin}endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /${MexEnd}>
</service>

And this is how he defines the MexBegin and MexEnd properties in msbuild:

<PropertyGroup>
 <MexBegin></MexBegin>
 <MexEnd></MexEnd>
</PropertyGroup>

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Env)'=='Production' ">
 <MexBegin>!--</MexBegin>
 <MexEnd>--</MexEnd>
</PropertyGroup>

This leads to a nice MEX endpoint for all environments and in Production we get the following:

<!--endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /-->

Perhaps it is cleaner to implement my own TemplateFileTask but untill then this clever hack does the job