When you’re working on the fi rst edition of your website in a development environment, managing
the site and its source code is pretty straightforward. You have only a single version of the site’s
source, making it easy to maintain. However, as soon as you put your site in production, you now
have two versions of it: one running in the production environment and the one you use for development.
This makes it diffi cult to keep things synchronized. For example, you probably use a different
database and connection string in your production environment. You’re also likely to use different
e-mail addresses for the e-mail that is sent by the site. Finally, you may want to disable sending the
error e-mails from the Global.asax fi les in a development environment. If you make all of these
changes in the code directly when you put your site on a production server, there’s a fair chance that
you’ll overwrite some settings during the next update, which can lead to unwanted results.