For my current project i would prefer to update my database to the correct version on publish instead of first run via the App_Start.
It seems that there is support for manual upgrades via a commandline tool 'migrate.exe' which is supplied together with Entity Framework (5.0 rc2). But i can not find any information about how other people have combined this tool together with msdeploy to upgrade the database on publish instead of first run.
I have found the following page which explains how to use the migrate.exe tool: http://blog.overridethis.com/blog/post/2012/03/13/Automating-EF-43x-Data-Migrations-in-your-Build.aspx
But this forces me to somehow 'know' the connectionstring information.
My optimal solution would be something like:
- connectionstring is configured in setParameters.xml file for replacement on publish
- on publish after publish of codebase migrate.exe gets called with correct connectionstring
It seems that what i search for is an 'entity framework MSDeploy provider' (see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2012/01/12/ef-4-3-beta-1-released.aspx) but it seems that they abandoned that option some time ago