Too many teams treat Entity Framework Core Migrations as a magic button until their schema becomes out of sync, their history breaks, or production deployments become daunting. Does this sound familiar? In this session, we’ll break down what developers misunderstand about EF Core Migrations and show you how to use them correctly.

You’ll learn how migrations operate behind the scenes, how to version and manage them across different environments, and how to prevent disasters caused by poor practices or misconceptions. We’ll explore real-world examples of messy migrations gone wrong and how to rectify them.

You’ll also acquire practical strategies for collaborating across teams, working with DBAs, and utilizing EF Core Migrations in modern CI/CD workflows. This is the session that will save your team weeks of effort and pain.

Who Should Attend:
• .NET developers using EF Core for real-world applications
• Engineers working in teams or with DevOps pipelines that deploy to shared databases
• Architects looking to improve development workflows and database safety
• DBAs trying to work more smoothly with EF-powered teams

Key Takeaways:
• How EF Core Migrations actually work snapshot models, metadata, and deltas
• Common mistakes like auto-generating everything or overwriting migrations
• When to script migrations manually and when to trust the tooling
• Handling multiple developers and environments without stepping on each other
• Strategies for clean rollback, seeding, and database initialization
• Integrating Migrations into CI/CD without surprises in production
• Patterns for using EF Core with legacy or production-first databases