I've previously written about how we handle zero downtime deployments with Entity Framework and Migrations but the post lacked an important piece of the puzzle: how to drop a column.
When practising continuous deployment, in order to drop a column, you need to follow the drop column shuffle:
Edit: 01/02/2017
We've managed to get past the roadblock described below and are now able to drop columns with EF Migrations in a CD world. More information can be found here.
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We've hit a roadblock with Entity Framework Migrations and our Continuous Deployment strategy and it doesn't
At Moneybox, we've implemented a continuous delivery pipeline using TeamCity, Octopus Deploy and Azure WebApps. Taking this a bit further, by making use of the deployment slot functionality of Azure WebApps, we were able to implement one click, zero downtime deployments with minimal effort.
In summary, this works by deploying