Entity Framework Database Migrations are broken for teams

So one of the things that came out of the Entity Framework (EF) model first was migrations, the ability to update your upgrade your database as your model evolved and even better can do this for you automatically.  Sounds like nirvana for developing against RDBMS.

Its just a shame that is fundamentally flawed if you have more than one person in your team making changes to the db at the same time.

The cause of the problem

The reason the migrations are broken is due to how EF Migrations creates a migration (be it automatic or code).

When you create a new migration via the Package Manager EF looks at that database and stores a hash of the schema and then when it comes to include the migration if the hash doesn’t match what it expects it won’t use it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

What I don’t understand is that like many other migration frameworks EF Migrations have a table in the database to record which migrations have been run

Types of Migration

Before we get into the why the migrations are broken a little background on the different types of migration

Automatic migrations

Automatic migrations create a migration with no input needed from the developer, it looks at your model and previous migrations and works out what’s needed.

Only problem is that even automatic migrations can’t do everything needed for a migrations e.g. column renames and MS themselves recommend you don’t use them in team environments.  If you Google EF Migrations you’ll find other blog posts that tell you not to use automatic migrations at all, they’re great for demo’s but beyond that you’re better off leaving them alone.

Code migrations

Code migrations are where the developer creates the migration themselves and provide the necessary functionality to both apply and reverse the changes to the database.

Doing this gives the developer controller over the changes which can be made via the objects EF Migrations exposes or by being able to issue Sql statements directly at the database allowing for those tricky scenarios which can’t be handled through the objects.

The cause of the problem

The reason the migrations are broken is due to how EF Migrations creates a migration (be it automatic or code).

When you create a new migration via the Package Manager EF creates a hash of the model that the migration was created against, this hash is what causes the problem since the model of each developer creating a migration won’t match after they have applied the migration and whoever merges last will lose out.

Try it for yourself

You can try this out for yourself, yes the example is a little contrived but its the easiest way to deliberately cause the problem. To make it eaier to reproduce I have prepared a repository that has an initial migration to create the database which has a couple of code branches which you use to create the migrations.

1. Clone repository
2. on master branch in Package manager console run the following command: 
   Update-Database -TargetMigration:'AddPostClass'
3. Switch to BreakMigration branch
4. In the Package manager console run following command: Add-migration ‘AddBlogAbstract’
5. Save all and then commit the changes
6. Swap to master branch
7. In the Package manager console run following command: Add-migration ‘AddPublishedDate’
8. Save all and then commit the changes
9. Merge BreakMigration branch into master
10. In Package manager console run: Update-Database

You’ll then be presented with a message :

Unable to update database to match the current model because there are pending changes and automatic migration is disabled. Either write the pending model changes to a code-based migration or enable automatic migration. Set DbMigrationsConfiguration.AutomaticMigrationsEnabled to true to enable automatic migration.
You can use the Add-Migration command to write the pending model changes to a code-based migration.

At this point if you are the person trying to apply the migration your heart falls and you set about trying to rectify the situation.

When you hit this the easiest way I’ve found to sort the problem is to delete the migration you are trying to apply, run the Update-database command and then re-run Add-Migration <migration name> –IgnoreChanges, hopefully you only created 1 migration before this happened.

Should you use EF Migrations?

EF Migrations are a full featured migration framework and have a lot of good things going for it, especially if you are using Code-First, but if I was working in a team environment with multiple developers making changes to the database I would look at alternatives to avoid the issue altogether.

Further reading

There are various blogs I found about this but the best is a very in-depth article on MSDN Data Developer Center which explains how the migrations work at a low level, why they use the hash and a couple of options to resolve the issue if you run into it.

Running MS Test on Team City without installing Visual Studio

One of the challenges if you are using MS Test has always been being able to run the tests on your Team City server without installing Visual Studio.

The reason for this is that MS Test expects assemblies in the GAC, registry entries, as well as other assemblies outside the GAC.

Now it is possible to pick apart what’s needed and install it all manually (as this post details) but that’s a lot of effort and it only takes one thing to be wrong and nothing’s going to work.

In the past I was faced with this challenge and started down the route of doing the manual install (which went wrong) and then I discovered Visual Studio Agents.

Visual studio agents are what you would use if you had on premise TFS Build server and wanted to add additional servers to support the build, the agent doesn’t contain the entire Visual Studio but does have just the bits you need to run things such as MS Test.

There are versions of the agents from VS2008 through to VS2013 so you should be covered whatever version of VS you are using.

Yes for the purists out there this does mean there is more on your CI server than just what’s needed to run your code, but we are talking about MS Test here

SPA Authentication in a .Net world

Recently I began a new project that was to be built as a Single Page Application or SPA and there are a lot of resources on the web to tell you how to build a SPA in a whole plethora of different technologies on various stacks.

What I wanted to discover though, was how to first deal with authentication within a SPA and later authorization and try as I might I found next to nothing about this. On top of this having watched John Papa’s course, Single Page Apps Jumpstart, earlier this year I noticed the discussion board for the course had numerous people asking about authentication and the answer was usually “look at the MS SPA app” but nothing more.

I was surprised at this since at its simplest all the SPA needs to handle is  401- Unauthorized and 403 – Forbidden response codes which is fairly easy to do, the complexity is in the authentication scheme and how it is implemented on the server.

tl;dr

Due to the lack of examples I could find for authentication I have created a GitHub repository to hold samples of authentication from a SPA, over time I hope to increase the number of samples and include other technologies.

A journey into authentication

So 2013 begins….

This post has been primarily delayed due to illness but also being very busy my new job.

Just like previous years I’m treating this as a retrospective on the previous year and planning for the year to come.

2012 goals

At the beginning of 2012 I set out the following headline goals I wanted to achieve:

• Blog posts
• Read books
• Presentations
• MVP
• Coding