Upgrade ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core 2.0 to 2.1

In the past weeks we have upgraded our ASP.NET Core 2.0 project to 2.1. The main reason for the upgrade is using the latest signalr capabilities and hosted services. The issues we had are related to the features we use. In our case the upgrade encountered some minor issues. In this blog post I’ll show what we had to change and give some tips on how to upgrade.

Advertisement

Increase timeout Migrations Entity Framework Core

Sometimes a migration takes more time then your default timeout of your database connection. In such a case you do want to increase the timeout for the migration to be able to complete, but you do not want to change the timeout for your normal operations.

Add Index with Include Entity Framework Core

When creating indexes with code first migrations in Entity Framework Core you can create an index on a table by adding the following to your DbContext:

protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
    base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);

    modelBuilder.Entity<table>() 
        .HasIndex(t =&gt; new { t.Column1, t.Column2}); } 

Implement Pessimistic Concurrency in Entity Framework Core

In a scenario where we were using SQL server as a queue, before publishing events to external queues, we wanted the data to be processed only once and in order, even with multiple processors for failover. When reading from the table we wanted to lock the records and block other processors from reading those records, while being processed. This is called Pessimistic Concurrency, unfortunately Entity Framework Core does not support this out of the box. To realize Pessimistic Concurrency you need to write your own SQL queries directly on the database (The solution is database type bound, in this case Microsoft SQL server). This blog post will show how it can be accomplished.