In Azure, you can create a development slot and then swap it into production with zero downtime. Useful for doing things like an Umbraco upgrade or installing a new plugin that would otherwise cause an outage. That's all great.

The way Umbraco is setup, if you have multiple culture/hostnames setup, you have to give each one an absolute URL with domain name; which means that if your production is www.example.com (for US) and you also have www.example.com/ca" (for Canada), you have change these settings for each culture when you setup the development slot: *dev.example.com and dev.example.com/ca and so on. I assume these are written out to the database and the local XML cache.

Then if you want to swap this slot back into production, leaving it pointed at the same database (since you upgraded Umbraco, which of course then made database changes), those cultures and hostnames aren't going to work correctly, because they are still defined as dev.example.com/ca (etc.).

Has anyone come up with a good solution for this? Azure does let you execute this "Swap" operation via Powershell, so I suppose we could get crazy and start executing custom SQL during the swap, but that seems like a lot of extra work, when really what we need is just for the culture and hostnames to accept root-relative paths, e.g., /ca instead of www.example.com/ca, or an AppSetting to specify the root domain, or something like that.