I have an ASP.NET MVC 4 project which is to be deployed to Azure for production, in production I use a SQL Azure database. My problem is that I want to connect to the SQL Azure database only in the production deployment, and not when developing, and that the SQL Azure connection string should be encrypted.
Now, I can solve the first requirement through a Web.config transform, so that the database connection string gets substituted upon deployment to Azure. However, I don't see how to combine this with connection string encryption? How can one both encrypt the SQL Azure connection string and substitute it for the development connection string when deploying? Best practices for this scenario would be most welcome :)