I can't take credit for it. One of the guys in my shop, Scott Abrants, is one of those obsesive compulsive types who has to find the deep dark secret behind everything. We found that when we were opening each other's projects, the database connection settings kept going away. At first there was recriminations & finger-pointing, but when it happened to Scott, he went and found where the connection was being stored. It's in the .user file. He did a bit more experimentation and sure enough, we can check that file into TFS, and then get it to each local machine and the connection strings for each configuration travel with it.

I'd sure be open to any other methods that work better and don't involve mucking about with files that normally remain hidden, but it's what we have.

I'm glad you guys liked the article. We're currently working through the best way to get incremental deployments working and automated, so I may have another one in six or eight weeks.