Couple of weeks ago I wrote about my small utility Config Transformation Tool, which I wrote with base of web.config transformation task. In those moments I was thinking about opportunity to pass parameters to transform file, to tool can replaces parameters in transformation file with special values. Yesterday I resolved this issue. From now I use class Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.XmlTransformation which works with strings and XmlDocuments instead of files. I had two tasks: (a) I need method which will replace parameters on values, (b) I need method which will be parse command line and create dictionary of parameters.

XDT Transformation is a new feature of ASP.NET 4.0 named Web.Config Transformation.

Scott Guthrie: "In most real-world deployment scenarios, the web.config file you use for development is different than the one you use for production deployment. Typically you want to change environment settings like database connection-strings, making sure debug is turned off, and enabling custom errors so that end-users (and hackers) don’t see the internals of your application."

But the chief problem of this feature - is working only with web.config files.

I investigated this problem, and wrote Config Transformation Tool, which gives opportunity to use XDT Transformation Syntax like at Deployment Web Application Project for any files. This tool is very easy, it just run msbuild task, which do this transformation.