[mkramlich]

... or tried doing iOS development.

Granted, given all the complex permutations and needs the iOS development team and XCode and Apple App Store has to support, there's probably a lot of method to the madness, a lot of "necessary" complexity. The problem is that if you zoom out a bit, much of the complexity one originally thinks is necessary, is not actually necessary, if you change one or more of your premises.

[mdelbo]

Oh I love the way Xcode handles this. Just setup multiple targets and use a preprocessor macro to switch between configurations. A nice drop down to select from when you're building. It's bliss! Learning the iOS way took me way less time than figuring it out for Android and it was a nicer solution.

[drivebyacct2]

I think people view this as too techy of a solution and I think people rely on their IDEs for this sort of thing too much, but after trying to automate my Azure deployments (local web, dev emulator, prod), I finally gave up and just resorted to having to manually comment/uncomment things in files and flex dropdown boxes across Visual Studio everytime I wanted to change environments. And I paid the 45-minute deploy time tax every time I forgot to change one of them when I deployed.

I'd have killed for a simple macro syntax to use within my config files. Hell, at one point I was actually (stupidly, one of the more futile tasks I've ever tried) editting the MSBUILD files by hand.