VS2008 Solution With Multiple Projects. Best Practices For Connection Strings And SSCE Files?

Hi everyone - I'm getting myself into a right muddle and am looking for advice.


How do people deal with connection string matters when taking a dataset defined in one assembly (and by default using the connection strings defined within that assembly in the settings files) and then using that assembly in an app (which also has a requirement to see the same physical database).

I'm not sure I've explained that terribly well but what I'm trying to avoid is duplicate copies of my database which so far seems to be the only way that I've managed to make stuff work. I'm not very experienced with SSCE data access (I'm a serices/sockets/ip person) and this may just be ignorance. Most of the examples seem to assume that the data is in the same place as the app whereas I'm trying to collate a whole series of functions into a helper assembly that I'd like to re-use for other things.

Ideally the dataset designer would provide an easy way of choosing from centralised connection strings - perhaps this is what the Dataset Project implies - but again the docs are mostly focused on SQL Server? Otherwise the best I've been able to do is make the connection properties public and try to update them that way or use a post-build action to copy the database from my datalayer project directory to that of my application |DataDirectory|

I suppose the question might be if you have a dataset containing multiple tableadapters that assumes one connection string, is there any easy way to keep such strings co-ordinated between projects without hardcoding them? With a server resource, the same non-specific connection string resolves to the same server (if that make sense) and this seems to be were I can't make the logical shift.

Does anyone have any thoughts and can they please point this SSCE noob in the right direction?

Cheers