Updating to RC2: Changes to EFCore, ASPNETCore, PostgreSQL driver & XUnit

The long-awaited 2nd release candidate came out earlier this week (here is the team’s announcement: Announcing ASP.NET Core RC2).

I have been sticking with RC1 and avoiding mucking with the nightly builds as Microsoft evolved this stack towards RC2 because so much was changing. Others were braver such as Shawn Wildermuth, the beardy Shane Boyer and the sad people who have been building products and tools dependent on ASPNET Core.

So as soon as the new bits were released I sat down to finally update the sample application I’ve been using at conferences since March that were still on RC1. Although it’s all cross-platform, I’ve been working on this sample on my MacBook directly in OSX and using only the CoreCLR just to prove to myself that this stuff is truly cross-platform. I’ve even set Mono aside.

I had two tiers of problems to attack: first getting the new CoreCLR (and the CLI that gives us dotnet commands, replacing dnx, dnvm and dnu) onto my Macbook, second was updating my sample which was dependent on a variety of technologies and APIs.

I’ve pushed the updated version of the application to github and renamed it: https://github.com/julielerman/EFCore.... But I want to share some of the things I did to get this all working. Shawn wrote a great post on updating his app and the aspnet documentation has a doc on updating from RC1 to RC2 as well. I would start with these. I will focus on some of the changes I had to make that either aren’t covered in those posts, aren’t as obvious or just gave me extra heartache.

I would definitely recommend looking at my repository though since it does have working code so if you’re stuck on something and it happens to be something I already did, you might find an example to borrow within my app.

Getting the RC2 CLI onto My MacBook

For most, it should be easy. Just follow the instructions on Microsoft’s .NET Core page (there are different pages for different platforms).

It seemed to work. But I quickly ran into some problems when I was tryingi to convert my code and those led me to a few threads that said I may not have the correct version. There is some question about how much needs to be removed from your system so that you don’t have leftover older bits of CoreCLR hanging around causing conflicts. In fact, a key element of the update is to run an uninstall script (on the instruction page linked to above). There was a pull request to update that script to do a better job of cleaning the old version out before installing the new version. (Since then that PR has been modified and merged and is now what you will get from the instruction page.)

I grabbed the existing pull request version of the script and ran it then re-ran the installer. So began a bunch of lost and frustrating hours because suddently the dotnet command was gone. I kept getting “dotnet command not found” errors. (See next section about that). Keep in mind that I’m still fairly new to OSX so some of my lost time was due to things like being told to go to the “usr” path and my windows brain translating that to users/julielerman. I made the mistake of going to the latter. That wasted a lot of time. But I eventually got it sorted out.

Because I did not have a straight path to success, it is difficult to say what exactly was wrong and what was right. Hopefully the new uninstall script will do the trick. If not I suggest looking at ideas in this thread: dotnet command can’t be found on osx with RC2 bits

Dotnet command not found on OSX?

There are two important takeaways in solving the problem of dotnet not showing up on OSX.

1) For those using zsh as the default commandline instead of bash:

“There is an issue in the way path_helper is working with zsh on OSX. The easiest way for you to get unblocked is to simply symlink the dotnet binary to /usr/local/bin using the following:

ln -s /usr/local/share/dotnet/dotnet /usr/local/bin

This may eventually not be necessary. See this issue for a conversation about making the uninstaller smarter on zsh.

2) Problem with dotnet command on bash

Another user had the same problem but on bash so the symlink was not the answer. Eventually he discovered that some app had installed the following into his ~.bash_profile file:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Applications/GitHub.app/Contents/Resources/git/bin...

He removed it completely and got success although Zlatko K (from the cli team) made this suggestion:

You can actually keep that and just have the following:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Applications/GitHub.app/Contents/Resources/git/bin...

I don’t know who did that to your .bash_profile but that is the reason why it is happening. And yes, they should not be doing this. They should be adding your path as well.

Updating Visual Studio Code and (yippee) Debugging!

Since I’m doing this on a mac, I don’t have all the benefits of Visual Studio, but Visual Studio Code is pretty awesome. And with it’s limitations, it really forces me to learn my lessons more deeply & memorably, whereas with VS, I can get away with more thanks to all of the extra support. If I was on my regular computers (read: Windows) I would absolutely be using VS, not VSCode). So doing all of this on the Mac gives me some advantages in having to comprehend everythnig I do more clearly. And, it’s fun using the Mac after only using Windows for so long. But I’m not trying to tell anyone they should do all of their .NET coding on a Mac.

So with that out of the way …